KURIAL: Pick up after yourselves people

This weekend, Positive Prince Rupert will be taking to the town’s alleyways for a summer clean. This will provide a much needed cleansing of some of the town’s most highly-trafficked areas, places in a city where the unfortunate reality is that garbage is more likely than not to accumulate.

Last month, the group performed a different kind of cleanup, that of the Moresby Trail. In a much more egregious reality, the garbage was beginning to pile up there as well. I was surprised and disappointed to find so much trash carelessly strewn along the trail, ranging from beer cans to food containers, plastics and more.

While there’s no good excuse for littering, at least in the city it is understandable how it happens. There is lots of activity and items are bound to be discarded. But when entering a trail, you’ve made a conscious decision to enter an area that is reserved for the benefit of both citizens’ physical and mental health, and the environment. This should be the last place we choose to discard our items.

Prince Rupert’s trails are one of the city’s biggest recreational draws. They are always open, allow people to get out and experience nature while providing physical activity, and are of course free. And it’s not hard to keep them clean.

If you’re going onto a trail and know you will be spending some time there, bring a bag along to hold your items in. There are bins at the beginning and end of trails to deposit items in. It’s not hard, and is a baseline of courtesy we should afford our fellow citizens.

There have been calls to install more garbage bins along trails. This could help, but also raises its own issues such as the problem of personal dumping. More bins could ironically make the problem worse than it already is.

At the end of the day, we all need to show some personal responsibility if we’re to keep the trails clean. They are a vital part of Prince Rupert’s plan to possess world class recreation opportunities, and they will be more fulfilling and enjoyable for everyone if they are kept clean.

Alex Kurial | Journalist

Alex Kurial