Dear ASU and Boone Community:
We are 5th grade members of the Hardin Park Beta Club. We chose a clean-up for our Earth week service project. ASU has a beautiful campus but some of us had noticed a very trashy area near the Library when we are there with our parents. Especially, we saw what looked like a thousand cigarette butts, and we were right! There were nine of us who met for this clean-up, and also an adult. We started at the bookstore and went all of the way to the parking deck.
We tried to keep count and think that we picked up at least several thousand cigarette butts and other trash. It looked so much better when we were done! We are hoping that maybe some students or others at ASU can help us to find ways to stop this crazy littering. There are not places for people to put butts safely in the area we cleaned up, so they just throw them on the ground.
We hope that some of you will have ideas, especially members of the ASU Student Government and the ASU leaders. We would like to see this place stay the way it looked when we left it. After the clean-up we talked about how this had changed our view of the environment. We also found out that cigarette butts are very toxic, unsanitary and do not decompose. Our views were completely different after having to pick up so many of them!
We were proud of what we had accomplished in such a short time. We also took some pictures. Here is a link to them:
http://waughmw.dphoto.com/album/89557q
Thank you for thinking about this,
Andie Waugh
Abby Marlett
Alice Knight
Lucy Rapfogel
Lena Miller
Marley Forrester
Sarah Toub
Rebecca Anderson
Gigi Waugh