Clean Green Beautiful North Bay has a new neighbourhood challenge to help reduce the amount of litter in the community.
The “BYOBG-Bring Your Own Bag and Gloves” initiative asks that people take a bag along on walks or bike rides to clean up any litter they find in their area.
Everyone is reminded to wear protective gear when picking up litter, while continuing to practice social distancing.
“You do not need one of the big bags. I take one in the back of my bike, and if I come into an area that has a few items, I pick them,” said committee member Hariett Madigan who would like to see people pick up at least 10 items.
“It takes a moment to pick up 10 items in a littered area. Just imagine what that would look like if everyone would do that. We would have a litter free community. Another goal is to go into Community in Blooms next year.”
Volunteers are picking up a lot of plastic in their travels.
“It is pretty scary sometimes because we are picking up plastic shards, and those plastic shards go into our storm sewer system and that ends up in our water system,” said Madigan.
“Hopefully we can go into another area of consciousness by not buying so much plastic and using recyclable containers and rethinking how we are treating our environment.”
The A & W on McKeown and Caisse Alliance are throwing their support behind the project by handing out biodegradable bags as well as decals at their respective locations.
Representing Caisse Alliance, Mathieu Shank says the staff is proud to participate for a second year.
“Clean Green Beautiful North Bay aligns with out mandate, and part of our mandate is eco solutions. We are planning on planting 15-hundred trees this year in our region,” said Shank.
“We are limited in what we can do at this point in terms of where we can go, people we can see. Picking up a bag and cleaning up a few pieces of trash is not very hard and it is rewarding. Prior to all this happening COVID-19) we had groups of staff go out for two or three hours at night together and go clean up.”
Getting off to a late start in its first year in 2019, Clean Green Beautiful North Bay collected 25-hundred bags of garbage.
Since April 1 of this year, over 62-hundred bags have been distributed.
“We have noticed a cleaner North Bay. When you’re driving down Lakeshore Drive on the main arteries, you can see how clean it is,” said committee chair Johanne Brousseau.
“If you visit cleangreenbeautiful.com, you will also see that we have an educational colouring book now for children which is a great activity for them.”
Clean, Green, Beautiful is also challenging residents to participate in “Clean Up Your Own Yard Day,” and join a “Litter Buster Team” for bigger cleanups.
Miller Waste picks up the specially designed bags on garbage day. The number of bags is not included in the weekly collection limit.
In addition to the litter free campaign which wraps up at the end of September, in a few weeks time, Clean Green Beautiful North Bay will announce it is moving on to an initiative to further increase the urban tree canopy.
More information will be released next week.