A St. George’s, N.L. woman is working to clean up her community one garbage bag at a time, and hopes sharing her progress will inspire others to pick up what they find.
Nancy Pearson said she’s been picking up trash on local beaches and the surrounding area for roughly 10 years. It started when she moved back to St. George’s and started running on Black Bank Beach.
“I started to run on it, and then it wasn’t very relaxing because of course it was full of litter. So eventually my running became more like plogging, and I started filling bags,” Pearson told CBC Radio Monday.
Pearson shares her garbage collecting on Instagram. Her account name, A Bag a Walk, is the mantra she lives by when heads out.
“I really tell myself ‘one bag max’ because it was just starting to take over my life,” she said. “When we’re driving on even the Trans Canada Highway, I’m looking over in the ditches and I can see the cups and the pop cans and food packaging. So to me right now, it’s a crisis.”
Pearson said much of the litter she finds is food packaging like coffee cups and fast food bags, but also things like shotgun shells, lobster bands and fishing rope. She said she’s seen the amount on garbage around climb in recent years, and is happy to see others show concern and pick it up as she shares it with her followers.
“There’s times I get really down and I go ‘What am I doing here?’ But then I have to be really optimistic that there’ll be a chain reaction eventually, and more people will maybe carry a bag with them. Because I think when a spot is kept clean, it’s harder to dump on,” she said.
Whenever people ask what they can do to help combat the amount of litter, Pearson says it’s all about controlling what you can control — like using a reusable mug for your coffee in place of a paper cup, reducing waste where you can or considering the amount of waste your purchases will produce.
