A group of Kingston residents came together on Sunday to clean up garbage in an area of the city’s west end that has had an issue with illegal dumping for decades.
“It’s been maybe 15 minutes we’ve been at work, and it’s accumulating,” said Peter MacLaggan, an environmentalist and entrepreneur whose Ottawa-based company Anupaya sells products made of recycled materials.
He and his wife, Shannon, travel the world cleaning up discarded waste and inspiring others to do the same.
“As a corporation, we supply the support and planning to bring people together to get out and clean up our shared spaces,” he says.
The business also has a branch called “Pathfinders,” which organizes garbage cleanups across Canada and around the world. According to MacLaggan, Pathfinders has about 150 volunteers, who they call ambassadors, worldwide.
Local ambassador Rhian Jansen alerted MacLaggan to a secluded illegal dump on Neil Road in Kingston’s west end. Jansen described the cleanup as “a lot of people coming together as community, caring about our planet and earth and doing something about illegal dumping and garbage in general.”
About 30 residents from all over Kingston gathered everything from discarded furniture to televisions, plastic, tires and even a dishwasher.
Organizers say there are at least 20,000 pounds of garbage illegally dumped in the wooded area off of Neil Road.
A community member, who chose to remain anonymous, said they have known about this area for over 30 years but that dumping in the area has consistently gotten worse over the last couple of years.
The source told Global News that vehicles, mainly trucks, back up along a laneway next to the road and dump truckloads of construction waste, mostly concrete and bricks.
“There is a pile of shingles not too far out there,” says Brad Busby, a cleanup volunteer. “It’s massive, and clearly, someone put a lot of effort to dump it there when they could have probably put less effort into putting it at the proper place.”
For a previous story, the City of Kingston said they are investigating the illegal dumping, and going through the pile to see if there are any identifying items in the debris.
“As awareness grows, which is the main thing we are trying to accomplish here, we can’t solve this problem today,” MacLaggan says. “The city is supporting us on this, but hopefully, we can get more equipment to tackle the bigger pieces in here we can’t move by hand.”
The City of Kingston supplied two large dumpsters for the cleanup effort, however, the bins were delivered to the wrong location almost a kilometre away from the cleanup location.
Organizers hope the city will now collect the garbage gathered and supply a backhoe to remove the mounds of rubble.
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