Sunridge Park Cleanup: How My Five-Year-Old’s Trash Pickup Mission Began

My five-year-old has recently become very interested in picking up litter. This all started after we watched a video by a YouTube channel called Half-Asleep Chris while hanging out with family. Usually, his videos are about Legos or his cats, but one particular video showed him picking up a ton of trash in his area in just a week. Inspired by this, my kid decided he wants to pick up a ton of trash, too!

It's going to take us a lot longer to pick up a ton of trash than it did for Half-Asleep Chris, and there are several reasons for that. For one, we won't be picking up tires or other difficult-to-dispose-of items. After a couple of trips to our public dump, it’s no longer free to dump trash. Additionally, we won't be picking up trash from roadside areas for safety reasons, especially with my kid. So, we'll be focusing on hiking trails and parks to gather trash instead. Those are actually the areas he wants to focus on because he wants to make the parks clean for all kids to play in. Those were his exact words.

For our first cleanup, we went to Sunridge Park, which is pretty close to where I live. The park is usually quite clean, but there's a pathway that goes up near some electrical lines. Unfortunately, teenagers often come to graffiti the walls there and leave trash and junk everywhere.

My kid decided to climb the hill first because he knew it was dirtier than the park itself, and he was 100% correct

The first item he found was, of course, a beet bottle tossed into the brush.

My kid quickly reached the top of the hill and noticed trash everywhere. Mostly paper items, some spray paint cans, and a lot of broken plates for some reason. I’m guessing it had something to do with 4th of July celebrations—fireworks, breaking plates, the whole shebang. But my kid was excited because he got to clean up all the trash and was glad to be helping the Earth.

Here are a few before and after pictures of my kid's hard work. (Yes, I did help him.) But he worked really diligently to get rid of this trash.

The next day, we went down to the main park to pick up more trash, since cleaning the top section took quite a while. Thankfully, there wasn't much trash in the park. However, my kid did call someone out for letting their dog poop in the grass and not picking it up. They were clearly embarrassed and went back to clean it up!

As I mentioned before, my kid wants to pick up a ton of trash. Since Half-Asleep Chris is from England, I'm guessing he meant a metric ton (1000 kg), which is about 2204 pounds for us Americans on the imperial system.

So we still have 996 kg, or 2195 pounds, left! This is going to take a little bit of time, but we're heading out tomorrow to pick up more trash at another nearby park.

Went back in the late afternoon rolling into the evening, we went back for a third time so the kids could actually enjoy playing in the park that my oldest had worked so hard to clean. This park has some pretty great views and is usually pretty empty. I think it's largely because there are no restrooms, which keeps the park's use to a minimum. Mostly, it's visited by people who live in the neighborhood and nearby areas.

Sunridge Park has some nice dirt paths that run around the perimeter and a great sidewalk for the kids to ride their bikes, especially since the park is typically not very busy. My oldest likes to race around as fast as he can, while my younger one usually rides a bit, then switches to the dirt path, and eventually hops off the bike to run up and down the hills. We do have to watch out for the occasional snakes we see around the park, as it’s pretty close to a canyon.

Speaking of the hill, all three of us climbed it. I'm not sure if these pictures do it justice, but it's pretty steep. The kids managed it well, and I did okay navigating it with my coffee. I didn’t really want to be up there, but the kids wanted me to join them, so there I was.

By evening time the clouds had cleared out and left us with a pretty awesome Sunset as we got ready to head back home.

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