Lake Country’s streets are a little cleaner thanks to one of its residents.
Heather Irvine, armed with a garbage picker and high-visibility vest, combs Lake Country’s streets for garbage on a near-daily basis. In the winter, she spends a few hours, four to five times a week, cleaning up the waste others leave behind.
“I’m just the person who hates litter, it bothers me and if I see it, I’m inclined to pick it,” she said. “We live in such a beautiful place, I just don’t understand the littering concept.”
The district staff has been helpful, she said and has supplied her with the tools to complete the task, but she’d like to see it provide more garbage receptacles in order to entice people to stop littering.
While there’s no set amount of trash she picks up on her walks, recently she collected 15 bags of trash near Davidson Road Elementary.
“I would like to see the district get more proactive because we’re such a tourist destination. If you look around in the summertime our bins overflow, especially if there’s a lot of food establishments (around),” she said, adding the most common garbage she finds are fast food waste wrappers.
Irvine has been collecting garbage since she moved to Lake Country from Alberta four years ago.
And garbage collection isn’t the only thing she does for the community. Every season, she decorates the fence outside of her home on Lodge Road for people to enjoy. It’s those efforts that her fellow community members appreciate.
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Lake Country resident Tara Shoemaker doesn’t know Irvine personally, but she wanted to share her story so she took to a community Facebook page to share what Irvine has been doing.
“I used to live on Bottom Wood Lake Road, so I would see her a lot, and I would see her picking up garbage and would see her fence and just think ‘wow, that’s awesome,'” Shoemaker said.
Shoemaker posted in a Lake Country Facebook group about the amount of garbage near Davidson Road Elementary. By the next day, Irvine had collected every scrap.
“I just saw these white bags all along the road and that was the first time I talked to her,” she said.
“More people should that she does this all the time. It’s not where she lives, or where she travels, she just saw the need and went for it.”
Shoemaker hopes Irvine’s story will inspire others to follow her lead.
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