Last Saturday morning my family went down to our local shoreline and participated in the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while now. It was one of those mornings where you stress to the kids “this is something mommy really wants to do…let’s try and behave.” They did. We really didn’t know what to expect. I’ve done other volunteer activities..but this one was amazing. Apparently, our location is the largest in Ontario. There were over 100 volunteers and the WWF panda bear mascot!
We all got these lovely t-shirts (that my youngest daughter wore to school yesterday). When picking out the location we would clean the fellow asked if we felt adventurous? Sure do! We opted to cleanup the rockier area of our beach. We also gained another team member, a lovely woman Nithya, so our team was 5 people. Once we had our t-shirts, our location, our gloves and our empty garbage bags we were ready to go.
Part of our job was to identify and tally up the items we collected. This meant we needed someone to keep track of our paper work…the perfect job for an eager 8 year old.
Along the way we uncovered a lot of garbage…beer cans, tires, plastic bags, cigarette butts, etc. The added bonus was that as we explored the shoreline in search of garbage we took some time to enjoy all that we saw. Like a field of milkweed and a monarch butterfly caterpillar. Gorgeous!
After filling a garbage bag and a recycling bag it was time to head back to our base camp. The most unusual thing we found was a piece of shelving…and an ear plug. Kinda gross, right!? We added our bags to the PILE of garbage bags. Check out the things that people found!
As I had hoped, the best part of the day was spending time with my family contributing to our community. Hands on, is the best way to learn. As we made our way through the bush, getting covered with burrs, it was very obvious to the girls that monarch butterfly caterpillars and discarded plastic bags cannot co-exist. They saw first hand that when you drop a granola bar wrapper it can end up wrapped around a small plant, harming its ability to grow. These are things I stress everyday – but when you take the time, slow down, and look around your own neighbourhood there are lessons everywhere. All that and we got a free lunch! Thanks Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup! See you next year.
