The area cleaned was approximately 3000 square meters and it took us about 2 hours. In total we collected 44 kg of trash, which makes about 15 g of waste per square meter. This is surprisingly similar to the amount per square meter collected on March 27 2016 (13 g/square meter) in another area of Edmonton!

As many of the city's problems, littering links to homelessness in one or another way. Correspondingly we discovered 2 large homeless shelters, both likely abandoned since a couple months, judging by the state of the left clothes and other items (mold, covered with leafs). One large shelter was fully burned with only metal objects being left intact by the fire. This area was not yet cleaned and not included in the survey performed this time.

Looking at the composition, the waste was mainly composed of plastics and clothes. This is very similar to what we observed along rivers and during another spring clean-up in 2016.

Plastics were by far the dominant waste type if looking at the volume. It was shocking to see how many plastic bags are lying around under the leaf litter. Very likely we missed a lot of it and very likely that huge amounts are being compressed and end up being in the soil every year. This plastic slowly breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces, however will not be biodegraded for the next few decades...

Impressive to see were coffee cups, where the paper part decayed, however the plastic liner still was intact.

The gallery below has some photographic impressions from this spring clean-up.