2024.10.09
World Clean-up Day
Do you know ‘World Clean-up Day’? This event started in the small country of Estonia in 2018, but soon spread all over the globe. It is the biggest worldwide event of the year, involving close to 20 million people in more than 200 countries. It became so popular that it is now an official United Nations Day that is celebrated on September 20 every year. Here at Eiwa, English Day was also on September 20, so I talked about World Clean-up Day during the morning service that day.
When I was searching for information about World Clean-up Day, I was interested to see that there were many volunteer events taking place throughout September all over Japan, including in Shizuoka. There were especially many events focused on the beaches in Shizuoka. This made a lot of sense to me, as I’ve often noticed plastic bottles and Styrofoam containers at popular beaches here. I decided to take part in one clean-up activity at a beach in Yaizu and then tell the students a bit about my experience.
To be honest, when I first arrived at the beach, it seemed pretty clean. But when my friends and I looked more closely at the piles of small pieces of wood on the beach, we could see a lot of small pieces of Styrofoam mixed in with the wood. As you know, Styrofoam is a type of plastic and is not good for the environment. So I spent most of my time just picking out these small pieces of plastic from the wood so that they wouldn’t go into the sea.
To be honest, when I first arrived at the beach, it seemed pretty clean. But when my friends and I looked more closely at the piles of small pieces of wood on the beach, we could see a lot of small pieces of Styrofoam mixed in with the wood. As you know, Styrofoam is a type of plastic and is not good for the environment. So I spent most of my time just picking out these small pieces of plastic from the wood so that they wouldn’t go into the sea.
Another thing that we were shocked to see was pieces of plastic net. Suruga Bay has many loggerhead turtles who come here from across the Pacific Ocean to lay their eggs on the beaches from Omaezaki to Hamamatsu. As our students studied in their third-grade junior high English textbook, turtles and other creatures eat small pieces of plastic because they look like their food. They also get caught in plastic nets and can’t escape.
Garbage is a serious problem, but I felt very encouraged to see how so many groups all around the world took part in World Clean-up Day activities. I believe that we can work together to make our world a cleaner and better place for all creatures.
