‘There’s garbage everywhere’: N.S. group gathers 100 pounds of litter in Cole Harbour

Community members come together to collect roadside trash.

Personal trainer Rick Horsman got a workout of a different kind this past weekend in Cole Harbour, N.S.

“I put a call out to my members and 24 of us showed up here and we just litter-picked up and down Cole Harbour from Otago to Cumberland and we gathered 100 pounds of garbage,” Horsman says.

Horsman, also known as “Rick My Trainer” says it only took the group an hour to fill their bags.

“A lot of cigarette butts, a lot of flossers, those little tooth flossers, a lot of those and just miscellaneous wrappers, plastic,” he says.

Roadside trash is an unfortunate part of spring and this year’s melting snow left behind a lot of trash

“There’s a lot, a lot of garbage. If you really pay attention, there’s garbage everywhere, it’s everywhere,” Horsman says.

Halifax Regional Municipality spokesperson Jake Fulton says crews have been out since early this month and they have a lot of ground to cover.

“The municipality, through the spring cleanup, we will go through 1,500 km of roadway cleaning and that is about 3,000 km of curbs that’ll get cleaned and all the sidewalks and bike lanes that run along them,” Fulton says.

“Those include street sweeping machines and other smaller machines to gather up any sediment or litter that’s on the sidewalk and in the street and then the gutters and also crews are out working to get the parks ready for warmer weather.”

The cost of cleaning up is built into the municipality’s snow clearing budget.

“Any street that’s ploughed by a contractor for the municipality, they are also part of that contract is to do the first cleaning of the street at the end of the winter season, so that is built into the contract,” says Fulton.

The debris can’t be cleaned up fast enough for Michael Hammer, whose daily walks aren’t as pleasant as they could be if the garbage was gone.

“You need to bring somebody out and start cleaning it up, I guess. I’m not sure who’s responsibility it is. It certainly takes away from the ambiance of the area, yeah,” Hammer says.

Residents can call 311 to report garbage on municipal property, but anything on private property is the responsibility of the owner

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