Every year on April 22nd, people around the world celebrate Earth Day and what it means to live on and take care of the planet. Earth Day started in 1970 and has grown to now include more than one billion people and 193 countries. While Earth Day lasts only one day, there are many organizations and communities that take part in different activities to help protect and preserve the Earth throughout the year. Keep Loudoun Beautiful is one of these organizations.
The purpose of Earth Day is to celebrate the achievements society has made towards protecting the environment and to raise awareness for problems that persist in the world regarding global warming, plastic usage, chemicals, and recycling. The theme of this year’s Earth Day is Planet vs. Plastics, which will bring awareness to the usage of plastic and how it takes 20 to 500 years for a single piece of plastic to fully decompose.
Around Woodgrove on Earth Day, students will find National Honor Society students picking up litter on the grounds as well as weeding and planting in the gardens throughout Woodgrove. Ms. Sarah Emerson, school librarian and National Honor Society sponsor, explained, “It’s right here and a lot of seniors have study hall or early release, so they have the time. We have the place. It is a win-win kind of thing in terms of convenience.” She elaborates by discussing how at this time of year there is a lot of litter around the campus due to the bad weather, such as the massive amounts of winds this area has received recently.
Recently, Keep Loudoun Beautiful hosted a town-wide event in Purcellville to help clean up sections of the town before spring. Volunteers were given a reflective vest, garbage bags, recycling bags, and a designated road to which they were to pick up trash along. Junior Ayden Lienau participated in the clean up. He comments, “Helping the community felt great! I felt like I got to be a part of things on a deeper level having not been as involved in the past.”
Lienau continues by saying that he felt like the experience was fun as well as easy and, due to the ease of signing up, he hopes more people within Loudoun County will get involved in helping their community. “It became a game of how much we could collect and what would be the most exotic, disgusting artifact we could find. I will begrudgingly confess, it was a bottle of urine,” says Lienau. Although he picked up some disgusting things along the road, he remarked that he had a lot of fun doing it with the people he was with, while feeling connected with the community. Although Earth Day has passed, as global citizens, we must continue the work throughout the year.