150 Bags of Waste Collected at the Arakawa Riverbank Clean-up Bookmark has been added
Tackling every kind of litter, ranging from cans and bottles to lighters and small pieces of metal scattered in the riverbank, volunteers collected more than 150 bags of litter in a little over an hour.
Organizer: Yasuhiro Oguni, Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting LLC / Business Well-being Leader and Impact Month Planning member
The Arakawa Clean-up is organized on a regular basis, not just this one in November.
Held on Sunday, November 12, 100 people participated in the event including 90 Deloitte Tohmatsu Group members and 10 family members.
By 2050, it is estimated that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish (by weight) and 70% to 80% of the plastic in the ocean comes from land-based sources.1 As the waste moves from towns to the sea along rivers, the density of plastic pollution is found to be higher along rivers than in the oceans. It will become nearly impossible to remove the waste after it reaches the oceans, making it vital that we remove it while it is still in and along rivers. In a way, removing waste from rivers is the last opportunity to stop maritime pollution.
As one of the largest rivers in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Arakawa is a symbolic place to tackle this formidable problem of plastic pollution in the ocean.
1 Reference: https://www.nippon-foundation.or.jp/app/uploads/2020/02/new_pr_20200221_01.pdf (PDF)
Many family members of Deloitte Tohmatsu Group participated in the activity.
With support from the not-for-profit organization Arakawa Clean Aid Forum, we collected more than 150 bags of litter, ranging from cans and bottles to lighters and small pieces of metal, in a little over an hour. The amount of litter was surprising and almost overwhelming at first, making us feel as if we were not making any visible progress. As time passed, however, we were all focused on picking up the litter in front of us. While we realize that ours was a very small contribution, if we think about the area cleaned up and the amount of litter removed, the Clean-up taught us the importance of taking action, even if its effect is small relative to the scale of the issue.
This should not be a one-off event - we should keep participating. We would like to continue with this going forward.
More than 150 bags of litter were collected.
Business Leaders were among the volunteers. “You have no idea about situations like this unless you see it with your own eyes.
A diary by an elementary school student