If you happen to be one of those people who toss your empty Dunkin’ Donuts cup out the window or just watch as your McDonald’s cheeseburger wrapper floats away in the wind, then shame on you.
And if you happen to do it within the sight of Amy Moffet, you might just want to make a run for it. Because you’ll soon learn that she has no patience for people who use the city as their personal garbage can.
“If you can take the time to drive to Dunkin’ Donuts to get a coffee, you can take the time to throw it away,” Moffett said.
To say that Moffett isn’t too keen on all the trash she’s been seeing around Concord is probably the understatement of the year and considering it’s November, that’s saying a lot.
Her trash picking up endeavor started a few years ago and has turned into what some may consider a mini crusade. First it was an Earth Day thing. Armed with a big trash bag and rubber gloves, Moffett would walk around her neighborhood picking up what others thought was appropriate to just discard wherever they pleased. That first year turned into what she estimated to be about 30 pounds of garbage.
But just doing it on Earth Day wasn’t enough, which was music to the ears of her daughter who attends Bates College and is majoring in environmental studies.
Fast forward a couple years and Moffett is picking up trash at least once a week, sometimes even more depending on how well equipped she is to tackle the stuff that has been out in the elements for a long time.
Moffett is an avid walker, going an average of five days a week. Sometimes she goes around her house, on walking trails around the city cemeteries or after work near her office.
“I have five or six places in Concord I really like to walk,” Moffett said.
And at least during one of her walks, she brings her disposable gloves, a grocery store bag and keeps an eye out for things that don’t belong on the streets, in the woods or over an embankment.
“I don’t always bring a bag with me,” she said. “Sometimes I do and other days I want to put my headphones in and not carry a big bag of trash.”
Let’s just say she’s collected quite a bit of stuff to bring to the dump over the last couple years.
“I don’t want my dog eating it or your child touching it,” she said.
One day she found 25 things and wasn’t even out for that long.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I could do this every time.”
When we tagged along for one of her walks along Commercial Street near Horseshoe Pond, the list of items she picked up was, well, the opposite of impressive. There was a red Solo cup, a cigarette box, a Dunkin’ Donuts bag with a soda can in it, an empty vodka bottle, an energy chew wrapper (which we didn’t even know those existed), bottles, cans, a real plate from someone’s house and one of those green plastic pots that she planned on using.
“If you look quickly, you’d think there’s not a lot of trash there,” Moffett said.
And that was just the stuff she could reach, cause down near the water was about 50 bottles and cans and lots of other items that don’t belong on the ground, let alone near a pond that geese swim in.
“One day I found a diaper,” Moffett said.
If you’re curious what’s the most interesting things Moffett has found, well, she came across a bathtub in the woods one day (that she couldn’t remove because it’s a bathtub) and a broken tiara with a “Never Give Up” T-shirt wrapped around it. As Moffett put it, “apparently the person did give up.” She even found one of those double coffee cake wrappers with one coffee cake still in it.
“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Moffett said.
She’s even has been taking things home from the office to recycle, although her husband asked her to stop.
All this talk about picking up trash got us thinking. What if every Concord resident (and anybody else who’s reading this that doesn’t live here) spent 15 minutes a month cleaning up their street or around their office? Just think of the kind of headway we’d make in a short amount of time. Moffett has already accepted the challenge, will you?
“That’d be a lot of garbage,” she said.
