Established residents and newer ones, young and old, and students from Willowbank: the village’s spectrum was represented at the third annual Queenston Earth Day cleanup.
Organizer and Queenston resident Adrian Schoot Uiterkamp deems the event a great success. “The most important part is cleaning up the earth, and discouraging littering,” he says, adding, “it’s a social event too.”
Doubling the number of participants over previous years, 29 hale and hardy folks joined the brigade and collected a total of nearly 30 bags of garbage.
Prompted by Schoot Uiterkamp as arranged, employees of the Niagara Parks Commission picked up the bags from five different spots in a timely manner.
Some of the “treasures” that were collected included five intact wine glasses (“Sadly they were not accompanied by a full bottle of wine,” jokes Schoot Uiterkamp); “our second small pet urn in a row; rusty chairs; the door of a personal safe with the pins removed; a small bag of cannabis, which resulted in a finders, keepers situation; part of a rusty metal hitch on the river’s edge, and a lot of plastic, actually.”