Day One: Kezar Lake

Contrary to our original plan, we decided a good way to test the ropes on our project was to go local at Kezar Pond. One of our challenges was planning out a time if we ran into a potential area that was not littered with trash. Today, we dove into our adventure knowing that all four hours would not be spent picking up trash. Yesterday, we purchased trash bags, trash grabbers, a speaker, and gloves to be prepared for whatever was ahead of us. It was a windy day, so we were careful not to let anything fly off into the lake. We got to Kezar at 10am to get to work. Kezar Lake is located in Sutton, New Hampshire, only about a 15-minute drive from campus. There are plenty of trails and a road that takes you around the entire lake. We walked for about an hour before stopping to eat lunch, and then we continued. One of the main things that we noticed was that there were literally no trashcans anywhere, and even though it was early spring, it was easy to tell pedestrians' laziness when it came to properly disposing of their trash. We spent a lot of time in the park area looking for trashcans and it was that communal area that had the most amount of trash. We documented parts of our day on our Instagram account which has been slowly but surely racking up some serious followers. We hope to encourage the state to include trashcans in these areas to at least have no excuse for the litter. We did not end up leaving until around 2 o'clock, and we carved out about 30 minutes for our lunch and around 30 minutes of mapping out reasonable locations for trashcans around the park and lake. All in all, we have plenty of ideas for the next two weeks in regard to living and encouraging a more sustainable, trash-less life. 

Hours- 10-2 (3.5 hours)

(30 minutes) on-campus work 

4 hours total 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Six: Rail Trail

 On Day Six we had the one and only Lynda Everett in town, so we had to use her to our advantage. We came to campus relatively early before our game to walk on the rail trail and talk business. Being our mentor, we naturally had lots to talk about regarding our week considering we spent much of our time crafting functional solutions and ways to live a little greener. Lynda is a big hiker and spends a lot of her time in the mountains of New England, so she gave us a few ideas of places we could travel to. Also, Kelby, Lola, and Grace told us a little bit about their project. Since they are creating a trail map of local hikes, we were curious about how much trash they see on their routes. They, unfortunately, told us that they see copious amounts of trash and that maybe sometime this week we could combine our forces to encourage people to hike in these locations, and also to be more aware of the mark they leave behind. Our walk on the rail trail revealed little trash which is once again
Read more

Day Seven: Phone calls and progress

 After this weekend, we decided that we needed to continue our education on the matter. We got on a phone call with one of Caroline's aunts who is also very passionate about the environment. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and told us about her immaculate community and what they do around there to keep it that way. Today was trash day and she told us that, like Bow, Gloucester excepts recycling and properly recycles what is given to them. This is not the case everywhere you go. In some instances, towns will use two different cans, however, both the trash and the recycling will go to the same firing facilities. This is not good news at all. We understand that this issue goes far beyond just environmental as it is also an economic issue as well. We have to recognize that for some communities, combining both trash and recycling is simply cheaper. We do not necessarily have a solution to this issue, but we hope to encourage people to take their recycling to facilities that will
Read more

Day Two: Putney Pond

 Today was a little different considering difficulties we ran into with my car. Yesterday we got pulled over twice because apparently you can’t drive with an unregistered and not inspected car or whatever. So this morning we took a journey to my auto works and the town hall to get that stuff DONE. Don’t fret, we managed to still chat about recycling and trash services at the town hall. We talked about how other towns don’t have these trash services and that was very telling in what little trash we found in Bow today. We indulged in this conversation for about an hours as they were pretty interesting in our senior project as well as Proctor Academy.  before making our trek back to the pond. There’s a pretty hearty loop around my neighborhood, and we made sure to walk there in fear of 1. The cops pulling us over again and 2. To reduce carbon emissions. We then walked around the pond picking up what we could find and clearing the trails a little bit so that fellow neighbors would be able
Read more