Sooooooooooo some people have been asking about my coffee cup project now that 1 year has passed since I first started picking up discarded coffee cups.
Every time I give the same answer: "The project is on hiatus."
Which is code for: I failed to accomplish the mission.
Last year I vowed (on camera) to pick up discarded coffee cups every day for an entire year. The aim was to collect as many coffee cups as I could find. I would photograph the cup, post it to flickr and store it in my garbage bag.
The first 3 months was easy. At first it was difficult to ignore the awkwardness of picking up a flattened coffee cup off of King Street on a busy noon hour in front of dozens of bustling Frederictonians. I did however, have some encouragement from some loyal CBC fans who excitingly asked if I was the "Tim Hortons guy" a day after an interview of yours truly was shown on the 6:00 news. The first few months was fun, but it got gross and time consuming.
Last Earth Day, I helped plan a community garbage pick up with Alycia Moorehouse, Suzie Lowthers, Tim Hortons, Picaroon's, and Feelsgood.ca and some awesome volunteers! I was awarded an artists grant from Feelsgood.ca and helped organize free burgers, coffee, donuts, and even had some live music from Stephen Lewis and Pirate Soul at Wilser's Room. Even through the pouring rain, volunteers helped pick up over 120 bags of garbage off of Fredericton's streets. It was a fun day to say the least!
So back at my failed project. I started to lose steam around May or June. I was finding it increasingly difficult to always carry my garbage bag around with me. Bringing a bag full of garbage is kind of gross to bring it to work, the mall, the bus, grocery stores, dentist offices, the hospital, etc... It's gross and a safety hazard to some.
I had to clean the bag every couple of days because sometimes I pick up some nasty half decomposed cups. One time I picked up a cup that was stuffed full of snot rags. Coincidentally the next day I was sick as a dog.
So those are the 2 excuses I'm going with, but runner up excuses are the following:
- taking the time to clean the cups
- uploading the pictures to flickr and tagging them
- blogging about the project
So it's a new year, time for a resolution and mine is to revive this project. I'm hoping to help put together another Earth Day event this year and will resume the project full steam. I suppose this will sort of act as a relaunch to the project. I'm hoping to involve schools and any other community that would like to help out. In the meantime I will be blogging, tweeting and facebooking my friends that helped last year and will ask for some help.
Please stay tuned for 2013's version of #cleanupfred.
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