Nagoya Earth Day Clean Up
Written by pedal.pusher on Apr 21st, 2009 and posted in 2008
Bicycles, generators and millions of cigarette butts!
- Close up of the garbage we collected
This Saturday was a BEAUTIFUL day. When I started out from my home in Anjo and got on my bike I was a bit concerned that it might rain. It was already 8am but wearing my sunglasses made things a little bit too dark. However, after about 45 minutes, the sun started to come out and it started getting hot. By the time I arrived in Nagoya (1 hour 45 minutes and 40 km later) there was hardly a cloud in the sky!
We started the clean-up event at 12pm. We had a few attendees all the way from Gifu and another from Okazaki. The turnout wasn’t quite as large as we were hoping, but we all set to work with our garbage bags provided by Nagoya city and spent the next 2 hours cleaning up the area around Nagoya’s TV tower. And OH, what we did find!
Salem and I, using the time to clean and simultaneously have a team leader heart-to-heart, found everything from countless cigarette butts to microwaves, to 2 entire bicycles disposed of in a city garden (that had conveniently been covered with grass and greenery so they were virtually unnoticable by the general public). The other 2 teams found similarly, tons of cigarette buts and also a generator, broken umbrellas. . .etc
Nagoya seems like a pretty clean place. When I was trying to think of a dirty place in Nagoya that we could go to clean up, I couldn’t really think of anywhere specific but as it turns out, you just need to be LOOKING for garbage. If you make a point to notice it, Nagoya is actually just as dirty as anywhere else. Most of the garbage is just pushed under bushes that line the streets, or in flower baskets that are decorating the pedestrian walks or in gardens under greenery. We ended up not walking more than 400m before our 2:00 meeting time and our arms filled to capacity with garbage (thanks to old and disassembled bikes).
We gave out delicious Organic prizes that had been generously provided by Alishan to all of the attendees! They all seemed quite happy with their Lara Bars, organic stone ground mustard, dried apricots and veggie burger mix! I was kind of jealous that I was an organizer of the event instead of just a participant I must say.
Next weekend will be the Shiga clean up event! Should be lots of fun!!
Thanks to everyone that came out in Nagoya! Although we were small in numbers, I think we made a pretty big impact on the shocked and confused Saturday afternoon pedestrians who saw us carting around garbage 
Also, Happy Earth Day tomorrow!!!!!!
