DON VALLEY RAVINE CLEAN UP
APRIL 27, 2019
APRIL 27 2019Our amazing OnePieceADay team joined together with dkstudio architects inc. and Don't Mess with the Don for an epic clean up in the Don River Ravines.
The morning started out with a few volunteers gathering around the main gazebo and setting up the central area. Even though it was a cold and windy morning, the small crowd was determined to clean up the ravine. After layering up (I was wearing at least 5 layers!!), we separated into groups of 2-3. Putting on a pair of gloves and grabbing a large burlap bag, I headed out into the woods with my partner - who by the way I had just met!
Quickly and surely, our bags starting filling up one by one, two by two. Then, all of a sudden, garbage bags started piling up one by one, two by two.
As the day progressed, the weather began to warm up and sun started to peek out. More and more families and volunteers joined the event. With these extra hands, the number of bags of litter were growing by the second. People of all ages were digging out buried plastic bags, empty bottles, and old toys. We even found a shopping cart in the mix of garbage!
Some of our most notable volunteers were our little ones - they're the ones who will be making the biggest change before we know it :)
We had the littlest member of 4 years-old join the OnePieceADay team at the clean up!
By noon we had gone through more than half of the burlap and garbage bags that we had at the start. And, even though it was lunch time, many volunteers didn't want to lose momentum and decided to push through and keep picking up the tons of litter in the ravine!
The team and hundreds of volunteers lugged and logged a total of 161,625 pieces held in 1293 bags of litter from the Ravines in a short four hours. Together, we tirelessly worked to better the planet one piece at a time.
This clean up was an example of hundreds of people coming together for an amazing cause of cleaning the River & making sure this litter does not enter our oceans.
Thank you to Don’t Mess with the Don for spearheading this great effort and to all the participants! Of special interest is the high number of plastic bags that seemed to be the majority of litter in the ravines. The next steps necessarily include the refusal and banning of single use plastics, especially bags.
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