... the one who will save the planet single-handedly, but feel I am helping in a small way. I volunteered my time today to stand in the middle of the street asking people for shoes. It is not nearly as bizarre as it might appear when you hear the details. All perfectly legitimate, with none of those men in the white coats with butterfly nets needing to be called to wrangle up the escapees.
In the interest of benefiting that organization I have mentioned before: Keep Columbus Beautiful. After receiving a random email about two years ago, I offered myself to be a member of the board of directors. I had no idea what I was getting into, other than knowing their goals were aimed at helping to protect the environment: keeping our waterways clean, public lands litter-free and community free from blight. I've been to a number of board meetings, with other people who desire to be invested in providing support for the betterment of our town. There are scheduled litter pick-up events, tree planting on Arbor Day, various service projects to involve students and encourage them to become invested in their city, aware of dropping trash on the streets, and more environmentally conscious.
The biggest annual organized clean-up is Help the Hooch, with a great deal of media attention, and publicity in the schools.There is much advertising of this one day project, encouraging grade schoolers, scout troops, civic organizations, fraternities and sororities, anyone in the community who would like to help with keeping trash out of the Chattahoochee River and tributaries. Amazing things are removed from lakes, streams, creek-beds and the river bottom each year: appliances, grocery shopping cards, bicycles, old tires, building materials, in addition to the usual bottles, cans, plastic bags and miscellaneous litter.
I spent my time at the recycling center just off Victory Drive, down near the river. The city was accepting just about anything that could be recycled. All manner of hazardous waste like petroleum products that have long languished in storage sheds and no longer usable: gas, motor oil, brake fluid, transmission gunk. Old cans of paint, thinner or remover. Tires. Any electronics that don't need to go in the landfill (like the dead printer I donated.) I probably saw more cans and buckets of paint to be recycled than anything else during my time spent standing in the road today. My job was to hand out flyers and remind people they could take shoes to any fire station in town and put them in the bin to be recycled until the middle of November. I think we collected nearly two thousand pairs today! That is a whole lotta' shoes!
Shoes: hundreds and hundreds of shoes, cleaned out of closets, matched into pairs and donated for recycling. They will be put in cargo containers and shipped to countries where people can wear them. The company who does the shipping will pay 40 cents per pound for used shoes - keeping them out of the landfill and providing footwear for people who will put them to good use. Any size, any condition, any type.
Also offering to shred paper you are reluctant to toss in the trash and not willing to spend hours feeding sheet by sheet into a small home shredder. A commercial outfit that does on-site shredding for corporate and professional offices donated their men and truck for the morning, for people to bring personal and confidential paperwork for destruction. They will bale and recycle the shreds.
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