Environment | One step, one bag

Green initiatives to improve the environment are multiplying on a small and large scale, all over the province. Twice a month, our journalists present ideas to inspire you.

Valerie Simard
The Press

The adventure began with a walk with friends, a classic of the pandemic. A step, a bag, then 900 others, filled with waste collected on the banks of the Lachine Canal in the summer of 2020. Two years later, the project continues and brings together several neighbors who have become friends.

As in many neighborhoods of Montreal, the melting snow in Griffintown, La Petite-Bourgogne and on the banks of the Lachine Canal reveals the winter waste. Soon, the small citizen brigade set up by Eliana Charlebois Gomez and Renaud Dupin, two residents of the neighborhood, will come out of hibernation to wage war on this unwanted trash that marks the arrival of spring each year.

This reality gripped them in April 2020. “We said to ourselves: if we go for a walk every day and bring a bag with us, we can pick up a few things,” says Eliana Charlebois Gomez. That summer was particularly good for waste near the canal. Remember the popularity of parks and picnics. The low water level in the canal, caused by work on the locks, also led to the proliferation of algae in which the detritus became entangled. “The Lachine Canal has a bad bet”, we headlined in July 2020.

900 garbage bags

Eliana, Renaud and several volunteers joined by means of a Facebook page went out every day for a collection. “That summer, we did 90 days of collection, remembers Eliana. We picked up around 900 bags of garbage. We were between four and six a day. We created a small neighborhood team. To this day, we are friends now. »

Last year, the situation having improved, the group made fewer outings – between 30 and 40 in total – mainly around the canal, but also in the streets of Griffintown. “It’s really sad, the amount of waste that exists in the streets of Griffintown,” laments Eliana.

“We try to make them aware of how it affects the water, the people around it, the aesthetics of the neighborhood too,” she adds.

This spring, with the return to the office, the reality and the flexibility of the participants have changed. Mobilizing volunteers remains a challenge, as shown by the dissolution of the Canal Bleu collective last summer. For 13 years, this group of citizens cleaned the banks of the Lachine Canal as well as the parks and alleys of the Southwest.

But the One Walk One Bag instigators aren’t planning on hanging up their gloves. Although outings are difficult to organize on a daily basis this year, they promise to go out on weekends for occasional chores.