We live in a lovely small town. It is very picturesque and natural beauty abounds. So much so, it seems some people have begun to take it for granted. Recently I’ve felt like I have been seeing more and more trash lying around. The litter isn’t just in one spot, it’s all throughout the town and especially in the park and town common. I started talking to my neighbors, and we all seemed to feel the same way – there’s just too much trash!
Because we live in a small town, there isn’t anyone assigned to pick up trash, even in the town park. We just rely on the fact that people won’t litter and create a mess for someone else to clean up! But, people had been littering. The question then became, “What are we going to do about it?”
Well, first things first, you’ve got to clean up the trash that is currently lying around. We all met on a sunny day and had some fun cleaning up our town. Doing good work like this is always satisfying, and when we looked around and the town and the park were trash free, we all felt a bit of “town pride”!
Then, we got to talking “How are we going to keep it this way?” What could we do to help encourage others to do the right thing, and keep trash where it needs to be? One person mentioned the fact that when she was picking up trash in the park there really didn’t seem to be enough waste baskets. The people cleaning up around the town common said the same thing. So, we set about researching if we could even begin to attempt to raise the money to place additional waste baskets around town.
Someone volunteered to look into our options. What could we get and for how much. What he found was that there were nice looking, but very functional wire mesh waste baskets that seemed to be within our price range. He said he liked the wire mesh waste baskets over the barrel style because they looked nicer and, after all, we are trying to beautify the town! He said this style of waste basket also seemed to be the most durable for the money, and we certainly don’t want to have to raise money to replace the waste baskets!
So, we went for it and committed to raising enough money for 2 new custom wire baskets at each site. We organized a neighborhood yard and bake sale in the park, and gave all of the proceeds to our “Community Fund”. People came out in overwhelming support of our efforts to better the community. We ended up with enough money to add 3 waste baskets at each site (so we can add ones for recyclables!), and our next venture (which we were able to start a seed fund for with our proceeds too) is to get some new playground equipment at the park for the kids! Who ever thought litter could be so good?
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