Sijia Jiang

Community Project – Adopt a highway

Jiang Sijia 1025653

 

    On April 27th, I took part in the community project, Adopt a Highway Service, hold by the Center for Leadership and Services. This service was about highway clean-up. We went to pick the garbage in the two sides of the highway which near west branch Elizabeth river. 

    Before I went to this event, I never notice there are lots of garbage beside the highway when I went out of the campus taking a bus or uber. During the service time, in the service group around 25 volunteers clean only two sides of 1~2 km highway. However, we have collected 7 full bags of garbage at the end. 

    What I found interesting is that while we are asking to do garbage classification. The transparent one is the recycle bag. The orange one is for real garbage. While I thought there were many kinds of stuff can be classified as recyclable. The principal told us that only the bottle and glass should be placed in the recyclable bag. Because something like the paper we saw on the road was too dirty to be recycled. 

    What’s surprised me is the plentiful garbage categories. There are cigarette butts, some water bottles, wasted food, straws, packing boxes, perfume bottles, screws, even an intact apple. I mentioned the apple specifically because it reminds me of the conference about food poverty and the food I have wasted in my daily life. We cannot see the value of the food which we can get easily, while many others can not gain enough basic or nutritional food in their community. 

    Of course on the highway, the most important pollution is emission. However, it is gratifying to see that some cars passed-by are hybrid which reduces the car emission. 

    By the way, because the place we went to service is near the West Branch Elizabeth River, I saw how the river was polluted. And I took some pictures of the garbage on the sides of the river. Compare with the highway, the river is more emergency. According to what I have seen during that day. I noticed that the river was polluted by domestic garbage. That reminded me of the water pollution in China. Many rivers were polluted by industrial pollution. And the rivers in the scenic area are full of tourist trash. All of these situations show the human’s lack of environmental protection awareness. This is bad news for sustainability development.