Day 3 - Ada Johnson Park

Date: July 22, 2021

Location: Hickson Park/Ada Johnson Park

Garbage (lbs): 1

Recycling (lbs): 1

This was our third park cleanup in July, which was completed with 3 members (plus one friend who volunteered to help) of our project group. We initially decided to clean up Hickson Park (near Hartman PS), but upon reaching the park, we discovered it was pristine and had virtually no garbage. This represented a flaw in our project's design: there was no real way to research ahead of time whether a park would have a lot of garbage or not; the only method was trial and error. Given that Hickson Park had nothing to cleanup, we adapted our plan for the day and instead went to Ada Johnson Park again to finish our cleanup efforts there. This time, we were able to clean up all of Ada Johnson Park. Despite having only a few members today, we were able to remain efficient in our cleanups and spent around ~1.25 hours cleaning up the park. An interesting observation was that most of the garbage we accumulated was not found on the grass or fields, but rather at high traffic areas such as the playground or water park. An interesting comparison is that between the 2 days which we visited Ada Johnson Park twice, there was seemingly no increase in the garbage. Indeed, it seems like Aurora's citizens are very ethical in that very few of them litter. It seemed like most citizens were environmentally aware and always threw out their trash properly. This led me to believe that the trash we did pick up was only an accumulation of the occasional littering over many, many years in the park's existence. At the end of our cleanup, we were able to acquire only 2 lbs total of trash, a 100% decrease from our second cleanup. This was again expected since we had already cleaned up part of Ada Johnson park last time, but also surprising given that our cleanups focused on the high traffic areas this time around.

#CASCleanup2021