How much litter was left behind during the winter, TakePride Winnipeg shares its findings

TakePride Winnipeg is asking city residents to do some spring cleaning along our streets.

Each year the organization does a litter index measuring how bad the litter is around the city, and this year the results are mixed.

“We drive around 12 areas of the city, about 500 kilometers of the city streets, looking for where there might be an accumulation litter…and we rate the street, one being no litter and 10 being a lot of litter. And unfortunately there are several 10s in the city” said Tom Ethans, Executive Director of TakePride Winnipeg. “But overall the city's not horrible. Some areas were a little worse than last year, some are a little better.”

According to Ethans, some of the areas receiving high-litter rankings include, the North Perimeter highway, from Brookside to Main, as well as Lagimodiere Boulevard and Empress Street. Downtown through fares Sherbrook Street and Maryland Street also ranked high on the litter scale.

Ethans said every area the organization looked at needs “some sort of cleanup help” and it’s specifically noticed a trend of Winnipeggers littering at stop signs.

“South Kenaston, from McGillivray, to the Perimeter there’s a lot of garbage bags, and some people have actually taken garbage bags,” he said, “I guess they throw them out their window instead of it going into the dump and that’s terrible.”

Thanks to some early snow melting, cleanup efforts are already underway Downtown, improving it’s rating over the previous year.

As for how to make the city a cleaner space, according to Ethans, everyone can make a tangible impact.

“If everybody in Manitoba took five seconds to pick up a piece of litter outside, that's a million pieces of litter off the ground,” he said, adding it doesn’t take much work to make a difference.