Tommy Kleyn of the Netherlands recently cleaned up a river singlehandedly, on his daily walk to work.
“It took me about 30 minutes to fill one garbage bag with trash, but one bag doesn’t make a dent in a place as polluted as this. I vowed to fill one bag of trash each day as I passed this spot,” Kleyn said.
As he picked up trash each day, Kleyn documented his progress by taking pictures and sharing them on a new Facebook page called Project Schone Schie.
Within just six days, Kleyn was able to make significant progress with his clean up effort, and when his neighbors started to notice the difference, they began to chip in as well.
“The idea is to motivate people to fill one garbage bag with litter each year. It only takes 30 minutes, it really makes a difference and you will be amazed about how good you feel afterwards,” he said.
When the story went viral, people from local towns began following in his footsteps and picking areas to clean up on their daily travels. In Kleyn’s area alone, residents have now helped to collect over a ton of trash in just a few short weeks. Now people all over the world are becoming inspired by this story after learning how a little effort can go such a long way.
Can you think of a place that you pass every day that needs to be cleaned up?
John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.Com.
