Tommy Kleyn rides his bicycle to work every morning along the waterfront in the Netherlands but he got tired of seeing how much pollution was lining its banks. He decided that he would fill one garbage bag per day with rubbish until he had cleaned it completely and his actions inspired others to help out as well. It is great to see how good it looks now.
“Everyday, I ride my bicycle to work along the river bank. It’s a nice route to ride, except for one part.”
“A stretch of the river bank is covered in plastic bottles and other pieces of (mainly) plastic trash.”
“This is the littered part”:
“The trash annoyed me very much, so, I decided to start picking them up.”
“It took me about 30 minutes to fill one garbage bag with trash.”
“But, one bag doesn’t really make a dent in an area as polluted as this.”
“I vowed to fill one bag of trash each day I passed the spot.”
“The area between the arrows was clean at this point. This is the progress made in only 6 days”
“I shared my experiences on Facebook and now, over 180 people ‘like’ the project”
“A lot of people were all like ‘There should be more people like you!'”
“And there were: this is my friend Rick helping out”
The Contrast
“The location was next to a bike path, and quite a few people got off their bikes and said what a great initiative this was.”
“The trash tried to communicate with me”
“The last garbage bag”
“In 22 bags of trash, this is the only item I deemed worth keeping.”
“The idea is to motivate people to fill one garbage bag with litter each year.”
“It only takes 30 minutes, it really makes a difference and you will be amazed about how good you’ll feel afterwards.”
“An Eurasian Coot started nesting in the part which I cleaned.”
