Long time Bradford resident, Albert Wierenga is an avid walker. He has been walking the rural roads in town since 2013, picking up garbage and using the profits to help those in need.
In 2012, Wierenga suffered a brain injury through Dengue Shock Syndrome.
“I was dying very rapidly, so the doctors totally flushed my system to save me,” he said.
As a result, “My brain just flopped right over, causing massive paralysis...and then I had to recover.”.
It took him nine months of recovery before he could drive again.
He was advised to start walking to help aid him with his rehabilitation and so he “started walking and walking and walking.”
He traipsed the roads near his home near the 6th Line and Simcoe Road and once he was able to drive again, he began travelling to further locations like Canal Road and 10th Line to walk.
He would walk anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half at a time.
It was on these treks to recovery that he began to notice the amount of garbage accumulated on the side of the roads.
From energy drink cans to bongs to old newspaper boxes, he says it was amazing to see the kind of things people throw away. It made him question why the littering was happening and how he could reduce it.
He decided to start bringing shopping bags on his walks and collect bottles and beer cans for their return fee and coffee cups to clean up.
“You walk anywhere, there’s beer cans, there’s bottles,” he noted.
Just this year alone, he has collected $400 worth of cans and has donated the money to charity.
Over the past two years, he has been picking up many McDonald’s coffee cups.
“As you walk these roads, you'll find all kinds of coffee cups. And the McDonald’s ones happen to be very recognizable and desirable because they have a collector's card on it and a little sticker” he said.
The McDonald’s cups each have a sticker on them, and when seven stickers are collected, they can be redeemed for a free coffee at the popular restaurant.
Just the other week, he contacted the local food bank to come pick up 48 free coffees worth of stickers that he had collected over the past two years. That represents in his estimation over 6,000 cups he has walked past.
He recently suggested to council asking to implementing a return fee for coffee cups to help reduce the amount of them being littered around town.
“If you had a return fee on every coffee cup, you might get more back,” he suggested.
In an ideal world, he says paper cups would be banned altogether, along with plastic water bottles.
“If you want to affect something you’re going to have to do something about it,” he said.
He acknowledges the banning would be an issue that goes beyond council, but for now he continues to do his part in making Bradford a better place to live, walking anywhere for four to five hours a week, collecting garbage.
He is an advocate for the environment and encourages
residents to be more conscious about how they treat the Bradford neighbourhood and to cease their throw-away habits.
