Community welcome to participate in litter, trash removal

Volunteers pick up trash and litter
along Gambo Road in Windham in
2018. Another effort to clean up the
area will be held from noon to 2 p.m.
on Saturday, May 1 and the public is
welcome to participate.
SUBMITTED PHOTO

By Ed Pierce

Amy Krikken doesn’t consider herself an environmentalist and isn’t much of one to celebrate Earth Day, but the Windham resident has organized an initiative to remove litter and trash from the trail area near Gambo Road and says she’s committed to making a difference in her community one way or another.

Krikken, the owner of Rockstar Real Estate, led a similar effort in July 2018 and said that she’s planning on starting at the trail’s end on Gambo Road and walking the area with friends and family from noon to 2 p.m. on May 1 to pick up trash others have littered there.

“Trash has been a big topic of conversation on the Windham Maine Community Board on Facebook lately and now that the weather will allow it, I’m ready to do something about it,” Krikken said. “My company is sponsoring this, and everyone is welcome to come out and join us. I figured that it’s safe to finally get a group together and go out and finally do this again.”

In surveying the area that volunteers will clean up, Krikken said she noticed cigarette butts, fast food bags and wrappers, discarded beer and soda cans, dog poop and other trash and litter.

“What I’ve found in the years that I’ve been doing this it that many of these items that are littered are things we think of as not being good for us,” she said. “My thought is that if someone doesn’t care about what they’re putting into their body, then they don’t care about what they’re throwing out the window and littering.”

The 2018 cleanup happened when Krikken worked for another company, but now that she has her own business, she said she wanted to continue raising awareness about littering and to get a group together to clean it up.

“As far as I see it, we have the power to bring good into the world,” Krikken said. “We have to be the change that we want to see in the world. It’s all about doing something about it and bringing about the change we want to see here. You can do something about it and it doesn’t matter how old you may be.”

To that end, Krikken said that children are welcome to help in this year’s trash and litter pick-up and she’s even recruited one of her own kids to pitch in and help pick-up trash at this year’s event.

“We are going to meet at the end of Gambo Road about noon May 1 and there’s plenty of parking all around there,” she said. “Even if it rains, I’m going to show up and do what I can to keep it clean out there. And if there’s enough interest, we plan on doing it again the very next day at Donnabeth Lippman Park on Chapin Pond Road.”

For more information about the trash and litter pick-up event in Windham, call Krikken at 207-317-1338 or show up and participate. <