By Spencer Sterritt

Fed up community cleans illegal trash on their own

Apr 11, 2017 | 11:46 AM

NANAIMO — Mike Lawrence knew he had to help when he saw yet another Facebook post about a massive pile of trash illegally dumped on the side of the road.

The post was made on Sunday, April 9 and the next morning Lawrence was out on Bennie Rd. near the Cedar Rd. intersection with his friends cleaning it up.

“Being that I’m a fisherman, I don’t want to see all that garbage around,” he told NanaimoNewsNOW.

Lawrence said seeing so much garbage strewn about rankled him to his core, since he grew up in logging camps where everyone cleaned up after themselves.

He blamed laziness for why he and his friends had to clean up someone else’s mess.

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“They don’t want to take it to the dump. They can easily just dump it off of the side of the road, not have to wait for people in the lineup to go through and then have to wait to get to the bin to dump it,” he said.

All in all it took Lawrence and his friends several trips to the dump to clear the area.

This wasn’t the first time he’s cleaned trash from the side of the road and said it undoubtedly won’t be the last.

Meghan Larson, the solid waste planner with the Regional District of Nanaimo, said roughly 33 tonnes of trash was picked up by the district in 2016, everything from mattresses to yard waste.

She said the number has gone down recently, despite no one at the district specifically working on the issue like there was in the past.

An agreement was signed between the district, Crime Stoppers and two forestry companies, Island Timberlands and Timberwest in April, 2016 to crack down on illegal dumping. Larsen said they are no longer meeting once a month, as they were at the start, but still have a solid relationship and continue to tackle the issue together.

spencer.sterritt@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @spencer_sterrit