I have always had a deep admiration for people who do the “dirty” jobs in society, things like collecting the rubbish, emptying the dog poo bins or street cleaning. These are low paid jobs that are largely taken for granted by most of us but just think where would be if people weren’t prepared to get up each day and do this sort of work. I had a very brief taste of what its like when I participated in the monthly clean up organized by the Zürich chapter of Trash Heroes.
Now, litter is not generally the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Zürich – its more likely that you think about chocolate, cuckoo clocks or an imploding financial services sector. So you could be forgiven for being surprised that there is a chapter of Trash Heroes that has been operating in Zürich for the past six years, still run by the guy who founded it. And, in that time, this group of volunteers has collected in excess of 7500kg of rubbish.
The idea is pretty simple; once a month, the group meets and, armed with rubbish sacks, litter pickers and protective gloves, you pick up us much litter as possible in a small area of the city. After about an hour and a half the group meets at a recycling point to count and weigh what has been collected before retiring to a nearby hostelry for well-earned refreshments.
This week we tackled a short stretch of the Sihl river near Zürich main station – from afar, it actually looked pretty clean but, within 90 minutes, my small group of 3, including my 10 year old son, had filled a 110l rubbish sack to the point that I was struggling to lift it. I have to say that I was pretty shocked.
Several things struck me about the experience – aside from the amount of rubbish that we collected, it was also sadly obvious that much of the litter was the product of laziness – it must have been thrown into the river by people walking along a street which has a plentiful supply of rubbish bins. The variety of rubbish was also quite amazing – we found all the usual things you would expect but also a watch, some keyboards (of the musical variety) and, remarkably, the base for an outdoor sunshade.
The scariest aspect for me was that you realise very quickly how persistent plastic is once it has been released into the environment. The group leader seems to have a well developed nose for sniffing out plastic even when it was well hidden by the foliage and it was great to remove this danger to the wildlife that call the banks of the river home.
The final take-away (poor choice of words given how much of the litter was from take-aways !!) was a more personal one – I wasn’t wearing a Trash Heroes tee-shirt and, clad in my waterproofs, I could easily have been a municipal street cleaner. There were a couple of occasions when I was working on my own at street level and I had this really strange feeling that passers-by were looking down on me. This struck me as odd given that, in reality, I was doing something that was making a much greater contribution to the common good than I, or most of us for that matter, ever get to do in their professional lives. My brief experience only served to increase the respect I have for the people who do this sort of thing day in, day out.
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