Hello!

Hello!  For a while now, I've been thinking about starting some big environmental project - something simple, but with a potentially big impact.  Just this weekend, I decided on my project: I am personally going to pick up 100,000 pieces of trash. 

The reason I decided to go with this project was based on a badge that my Girl Scout troop worked on last school year.  In case you didn't know, the Girl Scouts celebrated their 100th birthday last year.  In honor of this occasion, our GS council (GSCNC) created a 100th birthday patch, which our troop worked on.  The patch had 100 different activities to choose from - 10 in each of 10 different categories - and the girls had to perform one activity from each category.  One of the categories was the environment and the activity that we chose to do was for each girl to pick up 100 pieces of trash.  So, after a couple of meetings, we took the girls outside for 10 minutes and helped them find trash outside of our meeting space.  My co-leader and I would help the girls find pieces of trash so they could complete this task. 

And what I found after helping the girls for two weeks is that I now see trash - big & small - wherever I go.  It is like a lot of things - once you see the problem, you cannot unsee it.  And I've noticed that in our area, it is getting worse.

I live in what is currently the richest county in the USA - Loudoun County - in Northern VA.  In my general area, we are a sea of HOAs, with tightly controlled maintenance requirements and highly manicured common areas.  Heck, there's even one community which has spray painted the grass in their road medians green when it gets burnt out over the summer!  And it is very rare to see an old/beater car on the road - Jags, BMWs, Lexuses definitely; old 1992 Honda CRX no way.  Image is very big around here, as you can imagine.  But even in this image-conscious area, there is tons of trash along the sides of the road, in the grass at our school, in the parking lots at our shopping centers.  And it is driving me crazy!

My hope would be to inspire others to pick up 5 pieces of trash every day while they are out running errands or walking the dog.  Anything to help keep this trash from reaching our waterways and, ultimately, the ocean.  In this blog, I will be tracking my progress and posting pictures of some of the worst offenses that I see.  I hope you will join me in picking up trash in your area!

Take Care,
Kara