Brandon in need of cleanup effort

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This article was published 03/05/2022 (1605 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you have walked the streets and sidewalks of Brandon this spring, you may have noticed a lot of extra trash cluttering up our city walkways.

Every time I walk through Stanley Park, which is one of the routes I take to work, I find some kind of garbage lying in the grass or in the playground sand. Sometimes it’s hanging from the trees down Rosser Avenue, or tossed in an alleyway. Broken bottles, discarded and crushed tin cans, plastic bags attached to branches waving in the breeze, donut boxes and cardboard coffee cups — not to mention used medical masks on nearly every block.

And it’s not confined to downtown — many parts of the city seem to be inundated with a fair amount of unnecessary litter. 

This past week, for example, we were told by Rochelle Johnson-Boswell, programming and community relations co-ordinator with the Riverbank Discovery Centre, that there seems to be a higher-than-normal amount of garbage in the centre’s grounds — especially disposable masks. She attributed the increase to bad weather sweeping trash around and thwarting efforts to clean it up.

While that is certainly true, I think there’s more to it than that. As a collective, our disgusting city litterbug habits seems to have worsened over the last two years during the pandemic — and that’s not for a lack of effort to clean it up.

Winnipeg, too, appears to be having its own worsening litterbug situation. Last week, Take Pride Winnipeg’s annual litter index showed an increase in the number of streets covered in trash.

“It’s pretty bad,” executive director Tom Ethans told our sister paper, the Winnipeg Free Press. Like Brandon, there are plastic wrappers and surgical masks hanging from shrubbery, along with fast-food containers and cigarette butts in chain-link fences.

“It’s everywhere. I see it everywhere, and I count it as I go,” Ethans said. “We need people to help.”

You may be thinking “well, what does it matter? Someone will clean it up.” Sure, but on top of the ugly visuals of dirty, messy streets and neighbourhoods, litter and garbage adds an environmental toll, particularly for our waterways and wildlife.

Tossed masks alone are a huge environmental problem. According to a report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in July 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic was estimated at that time to have generated up to 7,200 tons of medical waste every day, most of it in the form of disposable masks.

Other garbage is just as toxic. Nature Conservancy Canada reported in March 2021 that more than 100 aquatic species have been found with microplastics inside of them, which can leach toxins into their flesh and blood, pierce organs and clog their digestive tracts.

We can certainly do better, but the public push to clean up our cities and highways that came out of the ’80s and ’90s seems to have evaporated. While there was certainly some effort to clean up Brandon last year, it was not enough. All summer long, discarded refuse was an obvious and constant companion in many of our parks, walkways and neighbourhoods.

We are, of course, glad to see that the Riverbank Discovery Centre will carry on its annual tradition of spring cleanup — extending it to a full week this year from May 23 to June 4. And as we reported last week, the City of Brandon is offering to help residents if they want to clean up a green space.

When I walk through Stanley Park, I do sometimes pick up the odd piece of trash and put it away in the public bins provided by the city. But I admit that it doesn’t happen all the time, and I’m sure there are other Brandon residents who would say the same. 

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. All of us can and should do more to keep our streets clean — whether that be picking up some trash from the sidewalk, or refraining from dropping it on the ground in the first place.

We could also use a bit more visual leadership from our city council on this issue. If our elected officials are seen taking an interest in cleaning up the city, perhaps others would join in. I recall taking pictures of Mayor Rick Chrest personally scrubbing graffiti from the walls of a building some years ago as part of a cleanup effort downtown. He not only set a good example for other people in the city and within our business district, but it was smart politics, too. We need more of it. 

I will in fact make this pledge — if our city council as a whole decide to get together to clean up a park or neighbourhood in the city this month, I will personally join them and add another set of hands to the mix.

And if not, well, I’ll continue reminding myself to pick up trash in Stanley Park and elsewhere when I see it.

» Matt Goerzen, editor