Cleanup

written by Kathrin Moll

Monday October 31, 2011, was the big day: my first environmental project toke place. It was just a clean up in the forest, but I think it was really successful. 

After some weeks of preparation and especially advertising at my class, everything was ready to start. So eight motivated friends met at Neckartenzlingen (neighbor village), the start point for our action. The weather was great; the sun shone and the temperatures were nice. I gave out some garbage bag and gloves; we split into two groups and began to look for rubbish.

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After just 100m my group reached the first place with much pollution. It should be a place to relax, with a bench and a fountain. But everywhere are plastic boxes and bottles, it looked like after a party. Terrible!!! After that our first bag was full. We went along an old Romanic road into the forest. Here a bottle, there some plastic, it was like I imagined. We found a little beer barrel, a folding chair, a garden hose and a piece of a door! Why are these things in the forest?! It is crazy. Actually the worst thing was still waiting for us. After half of the way, we discovered an old viewpoint. There we looked for some plastic and found… a big staple of advertising brochures under some plants :-( Somebody was probably very lazy and disposed the work like this. It is very sad that some people just think of their favour. Nature seems to be unimportant. We filled another bag with these brochures.

Only about 300m ahead the next surprise. In the part of the forest next to the path old plastic tanks, buckets and other equipment for building lay between the young trees. I don’t know how people can act like that. At this point we filled three additional bags. On the rest of the day we found (luckily) only normal rubbish and at the nature memorial nearly nothing. But this was just a little consolation against the pollution we saw.

At the end we had over ten garbage bag of rubbish, some new experiences and very conflicting feelings – happiness, because we had fun together and helped the environment and mourning concerning the plenty rubbish we found. In the evening we ate together a cake and talked about environmental protection. And it is sure that we will act again; another clean up in spring, maybe the Green Wave in December or something else.