‘It’s time now’: Take Pride calls on Winnipeggers to do some spring cleaning on city streets

The snow is finally, mercifully, melting in Winnipeg — but with the spring comes an unpleasant sight on the city’s streets: litter.

Take Pride Winnipeg has been fighting the city’s trash problem each spring for decades, by encouraging businesses, organizations and individuals to do their part and help out with spring cleaning.

Director Tom Ethans told Global Winnipeg that Take Pride has catalogued the state of city streets as part of its annual ‘litter index,’ and is now hoping Winnipeggers will get on board and help tackle the problem — even though the city, as a whole, seems slightly less filthy than it did last year.

“There’s a lot of cleaner streets. Overall, the city is looking a little better than last year, but there are still so many streets in the city of Winnipeg which I consider to be a 10 — which means there’s a lot of litter that would take a while to clean up,” Ethans said.

“It’s time now. The snow is basically going away and it’s getting a little warmer out. There are companies and there are individuals and there are schools that have already signed up to start doing cleanups.”

3:06 Litter on city streets improved, but still work to do, Take Pride Winnipeg says

While Ethans said the City of Winnipeg’s seasonal street-sweeping work — slated to begin later this month — does make a difference, it’s really up to residents to make the biggest impact, in Winnipeg and across the province.

“It doesn’t take much to make a difference…. If every person in Manitoba picked up just a single piece of litter off the street, that’s a million pieces of litter off the street every day,” he said.

“We need everybody to help and pitch in, and also we need everybody to stop throwing the stuff out their car windows or dropping it as they walk and just have some responsibility for making our place better.”

Community cleanup organizers agree that it’s really just a matter of getting a group of volunteers together with some garbage bags and tackling the litter issue head-on.

“We need the whole community to come out and rally together and do our part,” said Tanya Blantz, who is organizing a cleanup for the Point Douglas neighbourhood on April 27.

“It’s such a gorgeous community and it just needs to have that layer of litter taken off — the carts removed, the mattresses removed and the morale raised again.”

0:45 Take Pride’s annual Litter Index spotlights Winnipeg’s dirtiest areas, looks for help cleaning up

&© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.