“It’s about garbage on the ground,” says Terri Peace, “and
throw-away stuff.”
Peace is a community recreation programmer with HRM who coordinates
the annual Pick up to Win Challenge.
The rules are simple: participants—from youth environmental action
group HEAT—have two weeks to collect as many littered disposable
coffee cups as possible.
Over three challenges, they’ve collected a total of 10,000 cups.
This is year four. And after the junked cups are counted the weekend of
April 26 (Earth Day is April 22, so can we call that Earth Weekend? I
think so…), Peace is hoping HEAT will have tallied 10,000 this year
alone.
“And it’s not as hard as it sounds, as sad as that is.”
The challenge is about change. Not only “people not throwing them on
the ground,” Peace says, “but reducing the need for these kind of
cups.”
The final cup count depends on how much time the 100 or so HEAT
youth—it stands for Helping the Earth by Acting Together; it’s a
six-year-old program out of the Adventure Earth Centre in Sanford
Fleming Park—-can spare to look for cups.
And time, not skill, is all it takes. Look around: the snowmelt
leaves more blooms of garbage than it does crocuses or budding tips of
tulips.
“We’ve done it deliberately at this time of year,” Peace says,
“because of the [Tim Hortons] Roll Up the Rim to Win contest, which
seems to increase the huge volumes of cups that go out and how many
cups end up on the ground.”
Tim Hortons customers—Peace is one, though mug-wise she goes
reusable—stopped rolling March 22, but the campaign lingers in
bushes, storm drains and leftover leaf piles. “We always find unrolled
prizes,” Peace says. “Typically they are the coffees and donuts. But
someone already this year picked up an unrolled cup and won a $100 Tim
Hortons Card.” No wonder there are so many around—during the contest
even if you go into Timmies with your own mug, you’re still offered an
empty disposable cup to take with you to roll.
Contrast this with the Trident Café on Hollis Street, which
already doesn’t stamp coffee cards for take-out drinks in paper cups to
encourage people to remember their re-useables. Wednesday, for Earth
Day, the Trident began charging five cents for take-out lids. Two
words: Awe. Some.
Peace is all for it. “Retailers can do more to encourage
reusable mugs.” Her example: Tim Hortons and Robin’s Donuts (which has
its own Sip to Win contest) could have pull-tickets instead.
In fact, no purchase is necessary to enter Roll Up the Rim to Win;
coffee-spurners can enter daily online. But given that Tim Hortons
calls the contest its customers’ “favourite promotion” and Lee Valley
now sells a key chain gadget—the Rimroller: invented and manufactured
in Ottawa and sold for $2.50 a pop—that helps people deal with the
difficulty of rolling up those tight, waxy, spittle-dripping rims, it’s
a sure bet most customers aren’t going the cup-less route to potential
free donuts and triple-triples.
For three years, the cup dump (and subsequent cup fight—who could
resist?) has happened outside the Adventure Earth Centre at Fleming
Park. The youth—who do the Pick up to Win Challenge as one small part
of their year-round leadership and environment-driven community service
program—take photos of the cups and once covered the steps of the
stone’s-throw-away Dingle Tower with them. This year, HEAT is looking
for a location that’s “a little more public.”
Once that’s figured out…the Common? Citadel Hill? The beach at
Point Pleasant Park?…anyone could, in theory, show up with his or her
burden of cups. The closer the group gets to that 10,000-cup goal, the
better.
Sitting with Peace in the Earth Adventure Centre, I work to multiply
10,000 cups by the 10 cents per cup Tim Hortons gives off a coffee for
people who bring their own mugs (credit where credit’s due: that
is an incentive to not take the take-out version). Peace has a
better formula—“multiply it by the $400 maximum littering fine that
we have.”
That’s four million bucks.
But this isn’t about money. And, like I said, it’s not about Tim
Hortons either.
“Everyone says ‘Are you going to go throw those cups on Tim
Hortons?’ Well,” Peace says, “it’s not Tim Hortons throwing them on the
ground, right?”
Timmies: cause of garbage or innocent bystander? Let
me know at lezliel@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2009.
It starts: “It’s about garbage on the ground,” says Terri Peace, “and throw-away stuff.”
This is good. Picking up litter is a good activity. But the rules only account for cups!
Does HEAT ignore the other litter while scouring around for Tim-cups or do your bags runith over?
I’ve always found it engaging that you don’t even need to bring bags with you when litter-picking to the well littered areas, bags are provided amongst the litter. I’ve noticed usually not quite enough bags are inherently provided, but almost enough. Good compaction techniques usually get you by.
But I digress, does HEAT pick-up the other litter while scouring around for Tim-cups? Please let it be so.
Just as well you don’t count fag butts. Everywhere, must be tens of millions littering sidewalks wherever you go. I don’t look close enough to tell you the brand/s.