Respect Your Community

Dear Houlton Pioneer Times,
    Our whole eighth grade class got to do a good deed and clean up parts of our community. A lot of us always thought it was clean enough, but once we got outside and really started looking, we found tons of garbage. We had a ton of bags! Some even used more than one garbage bag. I don’t understand how most people don’t like their house dirty, or their yard dirty, but when it comes to our community, we leave our trash everywhere.
    Most people say that garbage lying around really isn’t that big of a deal, but once you think about it, it’s horrible for the environment. If the rubbish is just lying around for a long time, it will try to decompose into the ground, but plastic doesn’t decompose easily. Sometimes the garbage can even contaminate the soil. When the garbage gets into rivers and streams, it can cause a lot of damage. You’re making the water gross and if the supply of garbage gets way out of hand, then the fish in the rivers and streams could die off because of it.
    When we were picking up the trash, we came about some really disturbing things. The garbage smelled horrible, and it looked absolutely disgusting. It makes the community automatically unattractive by having a bunch of garbage lying around everywhere. It doesn’t make our community look very responsible for what we do.
    Visitors could come to our town expecting to see a clean community, but what if they realized it was just the opposite? They would think very differently of our community. They would probably think we’re careless of what will happen. Everyone should start caring a little bit more. If we did, something great could really happen and we’d get good feedback from people out of town.
    Now that I’ve given my opinion on trying to pick up our trash, please consider everything that I said. Not everyone leaves his or her trash around. Most people pick it up. To the people that don’t pick up their garbage, start doing it! If everyone puts in a little bit of effort, we could make a huge difference. Trash isn’t supposed to go on the ground. It is supposed to go in your garbage bag!
Lily Hanning
Grade 8
Houlton Junior High School