A popular walking trail was used as a dump site causing a hazard to walkers, horses, dogs and wildlife. I contacted a couple local govt. authorities but didn’t get any results about cleaning it up. I saw that One Straw Society had a mountain clean up project with volunteer work from local companies. In tandem with one of them, Hanson Land & Sea, we coordinated for some big machinery to clear the 5th wheel and burnt out camper van, and local people to volunteer time to pick up rubbish and clean the site. We used the grant funds for posters for the event to ask for volunteers, as well as provide gloves, bags, food and drinks for the day. And for a BBQ afterwards as a thank you to all who came out and helped.
The event day was Friday June 7th and we were blessed with good weather. The machinery started at 9am and the volunteers arrived shortly after. We used two small groups either side of the trail to advise anyone coming through to wait until the excavator could stop and allow them past. They hauled out 2 large dumpster containers and once the machinery was done a third smaller dumpster arrived for us to continue the clean up. We had about 23 people throughout the day, including a group of kids from the local Wilderness school that helped. We took the opportunity to talk about illegal dumping and the impact on the environment, habitat and wildlife, as well as the hazards for users of the trail. A challenge was some of the material was glass and sharp objects so we made sure everyone used gloves, shovels and brooms, no bare hands for picking any objects up.
It was an incredibly satisfying project! I have submitted some before and after pictures to show the size of the task. It is the biggest dump site cleaned up so far but the huge success of this project has brought this group together to commit to doing many more.
