TUESDAY, 26 JULY 2011 12:04
On Canada Day this year, I decided to celebrate in a ‘Green Way’. To fulfill my pledge, I contacted the Town of Milton and offered to help with the Milton Canada Day festival. They approved me as a volunteer, as long as an adult would accompany me- after all, I'm still in grade 7. As the saying goes, 'Where there's a will, there's a way!' My mom accompanied me and volunteered too, at this great event. I arrived there in the morning and met my supervisor. She welcomed me aboard! I wore a Canada Day t-shirt to show my patriotic Canadian spirit, and added tattoos of Canada and stickers on my shirt to show my enthusiasm!
At the Canada Day festival, I volunteered with Milton Canada Day officials to put bags in the recycling bins, and placed these bins in front of bistros that really needed them. I sorted through the recycling in the blue bins. In doing these tasks, I learned that most people don’t really know how to sort properly for recycling. I know that, in all likelihood, I'm not the very best recycler in the world but I can work at improving. Milton Canada Day Committee had a booth to encourage recycling and to lend a hand with preserving our environment.
When putting the bags in the recycling bins, I was very particular about putting the bag on the bin accurately so that there is not too much of it on one side than the other. This helps the bin so that if there is any liquid still left in any pop cans, it wouldn’t go into the bin, it would only remain in the bag. This job was harder than it looked, because sometimes the bag ripped if you didn’t put it on the bin properly. So that was one of the volunteering tasks I had completed on Canada Day. Plus, I put a bag on each and every recycling bin in the Milton fairgrounds so that is probably around 40 recycling bins.
My next task was to place the bins close to bistros that really needed it instead of two bins in a place that don’t really need the bins. Later on, once the bins were spread out properly, I came across four really nice animated costume people. Their names were Milty, Beeper, Sparky and Volty.
Milty is an animated character that represents the everyday officers of the Milton regional police that risk their lives to help us live in a safe community. Beeper is a smoke alarm beeper that tells us to evacuate buildings when they are on fire and without these many lives would be lost. Sparky on the other hand is a Dalmatian dog that helps with firefighters and represents them as well by keeping our community safe from any fire hazards. Volty is an outlet wire that represents that electricity is very dangerous and if using it you should always follow the precautions. This is what I learned from these four fundamental characters.
My last task for volunteering in the day before I left the festival, was sorting through the recycling in the larger recycling bins. Again, many people put hazardous items in the recycling bin. I believe that putting cigars in pop cans to make it look like they can be recycled is just appalling. It appears that most of the bad recycling nowadays is done by adults because there are many programs for kids to help them enrich their knowledge about recycling. Most adults actually know where everything goes but then that’s where the lazy factor comes in where they don’t get up to do what’s right for the environment.
This is how I celebrated Canada Day. Happy Canada Day to all those folks who just read this article.
