SATURDAY MORNING CLEANUP ACTIVITIES
SATURDAY MORNING CLEANUPS
Watercourse cleanup activities take place on Saturday mornings, starting early May. Dates vary from one year to the next. Please check the Activities calendar to find out when the activities will take place.
We find a wide variety of discarded objects in these open rubbish dumps: remnants of cars, home appliances, tires, metal wire, glass, tin cans, etc.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
We take precautions to avoid causing any negative environmental impact during our cleanup operationsand use only existing access ways. In some cases, trees are trimmed or cut down, if they are dead or diseased and not essential to the riverbank integrity to allow easy access to the site. Completely buried waste materials are not removed.
Large items or objects stuck in growing plants are sawed into pieces to preserve the existing vegetation.
HUMAN RESOURCES AND VOLUNTEER WORK
All work is accomplished by volunteers and supervised by a coordinator and their assistant. Volunteers meet at the Grenouillère parking lot (see the map here) in downtown Sherbrooke at 7:45 a.m.. The estimated return time is 12 p.m. (noon).
Given the hazards of some sites, we established an age limit for our volunteers. We only accept people 12 years of age and older. Youth aged 12 to 14 must be accompanied by an adult, though not necessarily a relative. This is a matter of safety and responsibility.
We recommend long pants and long sleeves to avoid sun exposure and contact with irritating plants such as stinging nettle. We also recommend walking boots or rain boots for soaked areas, although we mostly work on the shores.
DURABILITY AND FOLLOW-UPS
Most of the sites we clean up are not easily accessible, so they are generally safe from degradation caused by passers-by.
Furthermore, it is much less common nowadays to dispose of garbage anywhere one pleases. This means the cleaned-up areas are rarely used again as dumping grounds. Nonetheless, Action Saint-François still does the following:
- Publicize their work in the media to educate the population about the importance of keeping rubbish out of nature.
- Periodically visit the targeted sites to ensure they remain clean.