759 kilograms, the weight of a Smart car. That´s how much waste one person in Belgium produced in 2021.
Unfortunately, you can see that on the streets too. The capital of Belgium, Brussels, was among the top 5 dirtiest cities. But there are also people working to counter this, and that´s why I want to talk about my work experience at the public space department in my hometown.
As a student job, I spent a month working with the public space department, where my main task was to maintain the cleanliness of our municipality. And it was a real eye-opener.
On my first day of work, I was already shocked by all the litter we encountered in public areas. We kept driving from one place to another to clean up all the garbage there. It didn´t stop. The pile of trash we had to put in our van just kept growing. At the end of the day, the news came in. "Okay, so this is only one fifth of all the waste. Four more days to go". And yes, that was indeed the case. The following days, we had to go to other places until the last day of the week. Then, supposedly, everything was clean again. And then a new week came, and yes, you can already guess, we started again at the same place where we were last week. Because, lo and behold, there was that pile of garbage again.
It might have seemed like you were doing it for nothing. But of course, that wasn´t the case. By being there every week, we could prevent kilograms of waste from ending up in streams or rivers. And just for that, I´m so grateful to the people who organize clean-up campaigns, because it really does matter.