A big thank you to all the volunteers who participated in our annual Highway 40 Clean Up and helped keep Kananaskis clean and great.
We were a total of 105 volunteers, and cleaned 50km within a few hours. You demonstrated that you can handle a 50km stretch, so we will be looking into other available highway sections in Kananaskis that we could include in this event next year.
The refundable cans and bottles made up about half of the garbage we collected. We were more than happy to take the following to the bottle depot to be recycled and received a bonus $136.45 refund.
1,004 Aluminum Cans
10 Cartons 0-1 Litre
36 Domestic Beers
72 Glass 0-1 Litre
218 Plastic 0-1 Litre
5 Plastic Over 1 Litre
Interesting things found this year included: a fairly intact cucumber, golf balls, a fork, slippers, over 15 hubcaps, and gigantic elk antlers (which were of course left) . Here’s some feedback from a few volunteers:
“It wa
s a great day to be out in the Kananaskis – perfect weather, lots of volunteers, and a very well-organized event. The Blue Grouse was at the end of the road, and was most entertaining. He came right up to us, circled me several times and put on quite a show!”
“Today was so much fun— thank you. The kilometre between Wedge Pond and the bend south of it is so clean a person could eat off it!!!!”
“Always a great group and good organization. We found a wallet containing ID, credit cards and $110.85 in cash with a special key…(belonged to a free style skier) we handed it all in to the police”
“The most interesting thing we found were these gigantic elk antlers”
“Our group (4 of us) cleaned about 4km of roadside. We found:
– approximately 70 drink cans, mostly beer. That works out to about 18 cans per km
– over 100 cigarette butts. About 25/km.
– lots of reflective plastic pieces from guard rails. Probably dinged by snowplows in the winter.
– many paper / Kleenex bits
– several car parts: broken headlights; tire pieces.”
Thanks again everyone for your help!
Volunteer Program and Safety Update