YARMOUTH, N.S. — A small army of hard-working students spent three hours removing garbage from the shoulders and ditch along the Hardscratch Road on May 4.
A number of complaints about the stretch of highway had been filed with Waste Check. The cleanup was done by the Yarmouth Consolidated Memorial High School Grade 10 O2 class, with the help of some Grade 9 Discovering Opportunities students.
O2 lead teacher/coordinator Tarah Thompson-Schwan says the group had originally hoped to collect litter from the entire 4-kilometre stretch.
“When we started getting down in the ditches, there was a lot more garbage than we realized,” she said.
“We only had about three hours and I would estimate that we only got about two kms or so cleaned up.”
She adds that, considering the cleanup was not the case of someone illegally dumping a huge amount of garbage in one spot (like the students have cleaned up in the past), it seems like a lot to think that they cleaned up 1188-lbs. of mostly disposable cups, food containers, and other smaller items that had just been tossed randomly along a long stretch of the road.
The amount now brings the total up to 23,773-lbs. of garbage cleaned up by the YCMHS O2 program since the spring of 2014.
Earlier this month, Yarmouth resident Tim MacKinnon also tackled another portion of the Hardscratch Road, collecting close to two dozen bags.