On World’s Wetlands Day, Reefkeepers which is my service group organized a neighborhood sweep in our school’s neighborhood. The purpose of this was to clean up our neighborhood, clear out waterways which may lead to the ocean and to box the waste to the different companies. At 8:30am, I and other mates from Reefkeepers started setting up for the Plastic Patrol. At 9am, the OSC community started signing in and the gloves were given out. In total, we had over 40 members who came to the neighborhood sweep. Later, everybody gathered around in a circle and were given a quick debrief of what the objective of this event was and safety precautions. Then, everyone was divided into three different groups which were the blue, yellow and green routes.
Plastic Patrol Routes
Everyone getting grouped into different routes.
I was with the green route with 10 other people. We picked up rice bags to collect the waste. We headed out of school through the back gate and immediately started working on collecting waste. Our group managed to bring back 5 rice bags of waste. In total, all the groups were able to collect around 30 bags of trash.
Green Group trash collection
After collection, We started to sort out the trash into different brands and counted the amount and type of plastic found from each company. The highest contributors to plastic pollution in our area were: Nestle, Maliban, Anchor, Kotmale, Highland, Perfetti Van Melle, Munchee and the Coca Cola Company.
Then later during the service session, we wrote letters to the companies and boxed those away with the plastic and sent them off. This is to convince the companies to make sustainable packaging for their products.