On Saturday, October 28, 2023, the Oak Park chapter of Clean Up Give Back partnered with Urban Village Church to clean up Sunset Bridge Meadow Forest Preserve. There were 20 of us in total, including some families from the church and some OPRF civics students like myself!
I had heard that Sunset Bridge Meadow was a litter hotspot, but I had no idea just how much trash that meant. When we first arrived, the sun was shining and the park looked beautiful and pretty clean. Sunset Bridge Meadow is an oasis of nature off of North Avenue, surrounded by fast food restaurants and strip malls, and much of their trash seems to make its way into the forest. At first the path was pretty clean as well, but once we got to the stretch of forest that bordered the road, we found more trash than I could’ve imagined. The ground was covered in plastic bags, empty bottles, food wrappers, and Styrofoam takeout containers. It took four of us nearly 40 minutes to pick up one small area, but it was so rewarding to see the forest clean afterwards.
When we rejoined the rest of the group, we found that others had found discarded cartons of motor oil and multiple recycling bags full of just beer cans. We admired our pile and began weighing it. One of the young kids marveled, “We did all this ourselves?!”
I was pretty amazed, too. It turned out that in just an hour and a half, we’d gathered 140 pounds of litter! I had no idea we could collect so much in so little time. It’s amazing how much change just a few people can make!
