CENTRE WELLINGTON – A Belwood man has taken on a solo effort of cleaning up litter in Centre Wellington but he’s calling on others to take similar action.
Tyler Bowley, a lifelong Centre Wellington resident, has been documenting his findings on Facebook but it isn't valuables, it's just garbage.
“I don’t do it for Facebook likes or anything like that. I wanted to go and fish, I wanted to go and hike and I can’t now because I have to do this,” Bowley said. “It’s an obsession.”
This all started from a neighbourly concern for wildlife and livestock.
Bowley said he enjoyed watching Snowy Owls near his property and began to question if their prey eats the garbage he sees on the side of the roads.
He was also concerned about aluminum cans accidentally being processed in hay for livestock feed, which could possibly kill animals.
Bowley explained his first clean up was the laneway by his home on Wellington County Rd. 16, which is 10 km from any nearby town.
“In the middle of nowhere, it astonished me just how much garbage there was,” Bowley said. “You’d step on something and you’d have to dig it out of the grass and you find more. The more you look the more you find.”
He recalled in March a time when he drove up from Belwood to his house and he counted the number of Tim Horton’s cups he found along the way.
“Fifty Tim Horton’s cups and it just snowed,” Bowley said. “They were on top of the snow. That’s 50 people in a day tossing it out there.”
He started cleaning ditches and decided to go to naturalized areas he remembered from his time growing up in Fergus. He has found parks and the Elora Gorge to be particularly bad spots for garbage.
“I can go to Victoria Park in Elora every other day and I’ll pull out bags (of litter),” Bowley said.
In his barn, you’ll find piles that Bowley has sorted to be disposed and recycled appropriately. Some large piles, he says, are from a single day alone.
Bowley stressed he’s not an eco-warrior and you won’t find him going to a protest. He wants people to think about what happens to what they litter.
In Bowley's view, the problem is a mix of locals and tourists but also a byproduct of the rapid expansion the town is seeing.
“Wellington County is my home,” Bowley said. “This is my way of protesting what’s going on with the mass expansion of subdivisions and urban sprawl.”
He said an appropriate response from the township would be to run an awareness campaign rather than add public garbage cans as that can attract pests in the rural area.
"I would like to see the township say 'Give a hoot, don't pollute' adopt something like that," Bowley said. "It's more promoting a clean CW. At the end of the day, no visible garbage."
There is something at stake for the town as visitors being turned off by litter in tourist spots.
“Fergus and Centre Wellington are beautiful,” Bowley said. “But when you start looking at it from a smaller perspective, you start finding stuff like this and you realize it’s everywhere.”
In a recent post, he called on members of the Save Our Water activist group, who opposed Nestle taking water from the Middlebrook Well, to do a clean-up and post their results. He said he wants to see more than just a sign on a lawn.
“I call it selective activism, they’re trying to fight single-use plastic by putting signs and ribbons on their property,” Bowley said. “That’s all I’ve physically seen. I’ve never seen somebody with a Save Our Water t-shirt actually saving our water.”
He said he has had offers of help and supplies but is more interested in people taking individual action against this problem.
“If I can get one person to go out and clean up that’s one more person on top of it,” Bowley said. “If I can do this, other people can do this.”
