National Cleanup Day is tomorrow.
Participants (and organizers say there are millions) will do their part to keep the world around us free of trash, waste and litter.
Here’s a young person in the UK who’s made pretty much every day a cleanup day: Nadia Sparkes, who’s now known as “Trash Girl.”
The story starts around 2017, when Sparkes was a tween who was riding her bike to and from school near Norwich in the UK.
Along that two mile route, she noticed a fair amount of litter on the road.
But instead of just leaving it there and going on her way, she started picking the trash up and collecting it in her bike basket.
The more she noticed the refuse, the more she wanted to do to keep it out of her community.
So she started leaving for school an hour early, picking up more and more garbage on her rides.
Word started to spread at school about all this collecting… which did not exactly bring out the best in everyone.
Nadia’s mother says some kids mocked her, taunted her, even hit her and showed her a knife to intimidate her.
Once she reportedly had to sit through a class after someone dumped orange juice over her head.
Nadia decided to flip the script: the bullies had taunted her with the nickname “Trash Girl,” so she started wearing that name proudly, and doubled down on her effort to make the world around her a little cleaner.
Soon those negative voices were drowned out by those of fans.
“Trash Girl” won a lot of supporters online and in her home country.
Eventually she won recognition from UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who said that Sparkes was “changing attitudes on littering and inspiring thousands of [her] fellow students to take action.”
I don’t know about you, but I feel like doing a little decluttering now.
Starting tomorrow in Rapid City, South Dakota, it’s the Great Downtown Pumpkin Festival.
Pumpkins will be painted, decorated, weighed, cooked, eaten, shared and launched off trebuchets.
And along the way, there will also be a Pumpkin Pub Crawl.
‘Trash Girl’ Nadia Sparkes moves schools over bullying (BBC)
The Great Downtown Pumpkin Festival (Visit Rapid City)
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Photo by rjp via Flickr/Creative Commons