Flin Flon residents driving around town may start seeing orange garbage bags by the side of the road. These mark the spot where a good samaritan and a group of youth have been working to clean up areas of the city.
Nadine Smart has been picking up garbage from the ditches and roads of Flin Flon since May. She is not a city employee; in fact, she is not paid for this service at all.
“I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore, because I walk everywhere in town, and I just thought, be the change you want to see in the world,” Smart said.
Now, wherever she goes, Smart carries a pointy stick and a garbage bag in her purse.
Over the summer she worked at the tourism office at the Flin Flon Municipal Campground, and when she was walking to and from work she picked up garbage along Hwy 10.
Smart calls the City of Flin Flon to have the bags she’s collected picked up, although she said sometimes city workers see her and come before she calls.
City staff aren’t the only ones who have noted Smart at work. Part-time Flin Flon resident Blair Harvey saw her efforts and it gave him an idea.
He met with Smart and Loretta McDermott, Youth Centre program coordinator at the Flin Flon Friendship Centre, about coordinating their efforts with local businesses.
“I went to a friend in Dembinsky’s … essentially, I convinced them to buy an inventory of big, orange trash bags,” he said, “the idea being that when this group now cleans ditches as volunteers, and it appears on the shoulder, it will be in an orange bag.”
Harvey also thinks that it could be a service local businesses might pay for.
“Blair suggested … we phone the businesses and the businesses donate maybe $100 towards whatever is needed, and you do it so many times for them,” explained Smart. “The money would go to the youth group and it would go towards funding for garbage bags, gloves, anything else that’s needed.”
McDermott said engaging youth in volunteering is part of the Youth Centre’s objective.
“I believe it helps,” she said. “It gets them connected, and then as they grow they want to help out.”
The Youth Centre has over 250 youth involved, from the ages of 10 to 22.
Some of them joined Smart on the last weekend of September to clean around the Flin Flon Personal Care Home, Church Street, Main Street and some of the back alleys downtown, according McDermott.
She said youth from the program usually clean the highway from Bakers Narrows to Flin Flon. “Our highway cleanup has not been needed because of the construction,” she said.
Both McDermott and Smart would like to see more garbage bins around town.
“I just wish people would use garbage cans,” said Smart. “I’m praying that the city can put out more garbage cans, because even when I’m cleaning garbage, I have to sometimes walk five, six blocks before I can hit a garbage can.”
McDermott agreed that more trash cans would cut down on the amount of litter.
“Maybe we should as a community look to get more trash cans put in specific areas,” she said. “If they’re available, that would cut down. That’s what I hope to come out of it.”
McDermott said that she hopes the efforts of Smart and the youth might spark a change in residents, too.
“Maybe it will inspire them to pick up a bag and automatically do it to. Or don’t throw it out.”
A legacy of environmentalism
Nadine Smart started taking pictures of local areas clogged with trash a couple of years ago.
“I stewed over it for two years, and then finally I just said, ‘To heck with it. I’m going to start cleaning it, because it’s not getting done.’”
She collected more than 200 bags of garbage over the summer.
Smart has a message for people who litter.
“I say: Please don’t litter. I wish they had my dad behind them, like I had when I was a child, telling them, ‘Pick that up. That does not belong on the ground. That belongs in a garbage can.’”
She says her father was “an environmentalist all the way. He was recycling before recycling became something to do, and he taught us to respect, and to never litter.”
Smart goes out on walks to pick up litter once or twice a week.
“People that stop on the highway cannot believe that I’m not being paid for this.”
When she tells them she is not being paid, “They don’t know what to say.”
She says the response she gets from the community is “phenomenal. The thankfulness from people is amazing. People I don’t even know come up to me and thank me for what I’m doing and I’m dumbstruck.”
Smart always carries a garbage bag and rubber gloves in her purse. “I just do it whenever I walk.”
She says Flin Flon is not the only place where litter is a problem. “I’ve gone to The Pas and several other comunities and I’ve seen the same thing. It’s a disposable society, and that’s what it’s become. Littering is just a common-day thing for people.”
Her father left her the stick for her to use, “because he knew that I would, and I cared. I’m carrying on what he did.
“I’ve never gone a day without picking up one small bag of garbage.”
