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Kicking off SteemClean
Yesterday, my family and I decided to do a litter patrol at one of the local playgrounds where we often take our daughter. This was inspired by my SteemClean initiative post here. Not the most ambitious of cleanup efforts for SteemClean's first, but a solid place for us to start as a family. Besides, great things sometimes develop from humble beginnings.
First, the obligatory Steemit sign. For the experimentation and design phase I naturally recruited my daughter. Her unfettered imagination and creativity was bound to come in handy.
Quite quickly, I realized i'd made a mistake. Her designs lacked coherence and i felt she wasn't giving them her full attention. I asked my fiance to step in as I was struggling almost as much as my daughter. Our design ended up following a fairly well trodden path as you will see.
Here is the sign in all it's cardboard paper and chalk glory.
Right, we had the sign, our phone's for photos, rubber gloves, a new roll of black plastic rubbish bags and a destination.
So this afternoon we drove to the playground. When we got there.....it all went wrong. There was virtually no rubbish, a large party of people were sat around a nearby picnic table and started staring at us in a weird way, my daughter started playing up (because she wanted a go on the slide, not to scrabble around in the bushes wearing blue rubber gloves,) and the sign kept blowing away. The whole thing started to feel like some kind of completely wrong photo shoot and no SteemCleaning was getting done. Needless to say, I got the hump.
That was nearly that. Thankfully, we're a resilient bunch and we decided to try another playground and park instead. This turned out to be a great move as we saw plenty of rubbish in the car park and we began the litter patrol with gusto. I'll take this opportunity to apologize for the number of photos featuring somebody's bottom.
The people there were more inquisitive than dumbstruck so they didn't stare at us like we were imbeciles. One chap was so interested, he tried to walk off with the sign!
It turns out that my daughter is a liability when it comes to litter patrols. She contributed very little and required constant supervision, which mean't that only one of us could do any actual work at a time!
Things only deteriorated when we left the car park and entered the playground.
So I just got on with it whilst everyone else was having fun!
Andy the fruits of our labour?
Now it doesn't look like much for a couple of hours of effort.......well it isn't. Ninety percent of it was small bits of plastic wrapper and cigarette buts that no-body would really have noticed unless they were looking. However, a bag's worth of rubbish is no longer spread all over that park and it is of less potential harm to both the wildlife and the children.
The cost for this SteemClean was so low, given we would probably have gone to the park anyway, it might as well have been zero. A couple of hours we'll never miss to make a small difference in an ocean of environmental calamities. But it's a start and it certainly gives you a taste that make you want more.
In accordance with the SteemClean proposal, any SD rewards that this post receives, will be used for one or more of these three options;
- To fund my next SteemClean effort
- To fund another Steemer's SteemClean effort
- To fund a SteemClean account for larger SteemClean projects
- A combination
I will notify Steemers on any distribution of funds in a new post assuming there are any ;)
I hope Steemers with integrity and talents for mobilization, organisation and motivation are inspired to get involved and take this initiative further than I ever could.