City residents will break out the gloves and grabbers later this month as part of city-wide effort to spruce up local parks.
City staffers are organizing the second annual City-Wide Clean Up this Sept. 14. The event, a spinoff of the annual Sturgeon River cleanup, encourages residents to spend a day picking up trash in the neighbourhood of their choice to beautify the city.
The event is meant to empower people to help improve their neighbourhoods, said Margo Brenneis, community recreation co-ordinator with the City of St. Albert. “An hour or a half hour of people from your neighbourhood can make a big difference in the cleanliness of your neighbourhood.”
Like last year, participants are asked to sign up and pick an area of the city to clean up. The city will supply the gloves, bags and post-event trash pickup.
This year’s event will be a single, daylong clean-up instead of two shorter ones on two days, Brenneis said, at the suggestion of residents who wanted to pitch in throughout the day instead of in a specific time window.
The switch to a single-day event also lets the city hold a barbecue for all participants, Brenneis said. Volunteers can come by the back of St. Albert Place from 4 to 6 p.m. for free food.
The cleanup runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. this Sept. 14. Participants can register at www.stalbert.ca/city-wide-clean-up-registration, by calling 780-459-1600, or at the back of St. Albert Place on the day of the event.
Last year’s event drew about 157 people and gathered 430 kilograms of trash.
A coalition of Alberta health groups wants the province to swear off coal-fired electricity.
The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), in partnership with the Asthma Society of Canada and the Alberta Lung Association, launched a province-wide media campaign Wednesday asking residents to tell Premier Alison Redford that they want a coal-free Alberta.
It follows on a report issued by this same group plus the Pembina Institute last March that looked at the health and environmental impact of coal in Alberta.
Coal is a disaster from start to finish, said Gideon Forman, CAPE’s executive director, as it releases a long list of heavy metals and greenhouse gas emissions when burned. “It’s harmful to human health and it’s terribly harmful to the planet.”
Coal power accounts for about 18.5 per cent of Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Pembina report found – equivalent to the entire oilsands industry – and about 44 per cent of its mercury emissions.
These and other forms of pollution contributed to smog, asthma, heart disease, and premature death. The Pembina report, using a model made by the Canadian Medical Association, estimated that coal pollution contributed to about 100 premature deaths and 4,800 days of lost productivity due to asthma a year in Alberta, at a cost of about $300 million.
“All over the world, scientific studies show that coal is a huge contributing factor in death and illness,” Forman said. While federal regulations will force Alberta off coal by 2062, he hoped Alberta would switch from coal to renewable sources much sooner. Ontario used to have about as much coal power as Alberta, he noted, and is set to close its last coal plant next year.
St. Albert air quality researcher David Spink, who reviewed a draft of the Pembina report, and fellow local researcher Warren Kindzierski disputed the report’s health and cost estimates, as it made some problematic assumptions (such as extrapolating the effects of urban pollution sources to industrial ones despite the distance of coal plants from major cities).
Still, Spink said he supported the campaign’s underlying message that air pollution did have health impacts, and that we should try to minimize air pollution through use of clean technologies. “My concern is that when making decisions on these fronts, we need to ensure that they are based on sound/good science.” Cape.ca has more details on this campaign.
