Carroll Township families clean up on Earth Day
By TAYLOR BROWN
tbrown@yourmvi.com
While Earth Day was celebrated Wednesday with social distancing in mind, many residents and organizations took to social media to share the things they did – big and small – to make a difference in their own backyards.
In Carroll Township, nearly a dozen children wearing gloves and masks with garbage bags in tow, got to work on Wednesday to celebrate Earth Day.
The children, which range in grade from pre-school to middle school, made signs with their parents before putting on protective gear to help clean up debris-cluttered Carroll Lane, a private roadway near the Monongahela Valley Country Club in Carroll Township.
The signs depicted various images of Earth, some with other planets, others with a birthday hat and one that read “Earth Day Quarantine 2020.”
While practicing social distancing, the children challenged each other to see who could pick up the most trash.
After about an hour of work, the group collected nearly 20 bags of trash from the roadway.
Kerrie Dague organized the effort after her husband, Matthew, noticed all of the litter during a recent jog.
“He mentioned it and I thought it would be a nice idea with the kids being out of school and it being Earth Day,” she said. “We all made signs and talked to them about why it is important to not litter and made a little lesson out of it.”
While it was a little chilly outside, the kids had a blast, she said.
“They are really having fun,” she said. “They are challenging each other and running ahead of each other to pick things up. They are working like crazy.”
Dague said she has never done anything like this as her children are usually in school.
“We just saw it as an opportunity to get out of the house, teach the kids about Earth Day and do something meaningful,” she said.
Carroll Township police Chief Paul Brand followed the children’s lead in his patrol car to make sure they were safe along the roadway.
“It was a nice day and a really good turn out,” Brand said. “With school being closed and it being Earth Day it was nice to see the kids out and excited to do some public service.”
The garbage bags were provided by the Carroll Township Road Department, who will pick up the bags of collected trash today to dispose of them.
The children worked for nearly two hours before heading home.
Earth Day began on April 22, 1970 when more than 20 million Americans took to the streets, college campuses and hundreds of cities to protest environmental ignorance after oil spills, smog and water pollution so severe some rivers caught fire.
Several environmental laws including The Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency followed the protests.
In 2016, the United Nations chose Earth Day as the day when the historic Paris Agreement on climate change was signed.
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