‘No one else is going to pick it up’
Self-confessed ‘trash queen’ cleaning up and counting Halifax litter
Quinn Vikedal’s trash collecting expeditions began out of a quest for connection.
The 21-year-old environmental science major in her third year at Dalhousie University hails from Duchess, in southern Alberta, where the population hovers around 1,085.
“I come from this very small community, and I’m so used to just knowing all my neighbours, it feels weird not having that here,” Vikedal said in a recent interview.
“Honestly, it was a way for me to get outside and run into people chat with people and really meet some dogs, because I miss mine at home.”
LITTER LOCALES
Vikedal had already started picking up garbage during her regular walks of the neighbourhoods surrounding Dal last fall when a classmate questioned whether she finds different litter in different places.
“I absolutely do,” was Vikedal’s response.
Anecdotally, she knew she was seeing more fast-food wrappers around schoolyards, and cigarette butts near business doorways, but she couldn’t put any numbers on her trash treks.
“So, I just started counting,” Vikedal said.
“I have a spreadsheet where I keep everything.”
The first day she recorded was Oct. 26, 2023.
SPRING GARDEN TRASH
“I walked 2.71 kilometres and I only picked up about 500 pieces of garbage because I walked all within a residential neighbourhood,” Vikedal said.
“But then when I walked down Spring Garden Road in November, I only made it 250 metres and I picked up 1,200 pieces of trash.”
Litter accumulates at bus stops, street corners, and in doorways, she said.
“Anywhere where people have to stop, stand and wait.”
She hasn’t created any strict goals for the trash-collecting expeditions.
“Lots of days I go for a walk, and I walk until I get tired,” Vikedal said.
“Or I try to walk until I’ve made a loop back to my house.”
‘WORKED OUT REALLY NICELY’
As of Monday, she has covered 21.75 kilometres and picked up 14,400 pieces of garbage, including 9,500 cigarette butts.
“Honestly, it has worked out really nicely. I’ve met so many people. Lately I’ve been concentrating my efforts on the Quinpool Road area because I’ve been meeting so many business owners and I’m really starting to get to know a couple of people. It’s nice when people come up to me and recognize me.”
This past Saturday night while revellers celebrated St. Patrick’s Day early, she picked up 861 pieces of trash on a 700-metres stretch of Quinpool, 492 of them cigarette butts. She wasn’t moving particularly fast – that expedition lasted about two hours.
Her longest walk took Vikedal about 5.7 km around residential areas surrounding Dal. “I picked up 1,000 pieces of trash,” she said, noting that included 559 cigarette butts.
BELL ROAD HAUL
“The largest amount of garbage I’ve picked up in a day was 3,200 pieces on Nov. 16, 2023, over 2.08 km. And that was going towards Spring Garden via Bell Road.”
Snow and wet weather crimped her style in February. “It was slippery, and I really just couldn’t see the garbage.”
Common finds include “a lot of broken glass,” fast-food containers, straws, and disposable cups.
TRASHY TREASURES
Her trash treks have also turned up some treasures. “I found a skateboard,” Vikedal said. “I painted it as a gift for my boyfriend.”
She once found a $100 bill. “I think I took it to the Vintage Expo before Christmas to go buy my brother Christmas presents.”
Vikedal pulls a blue, collapsible canvas cart her aunt gave her a few birthdays back
and wields a trash-picking stick with a claw on the end that she bought at Dollarama. She has counters attached to her waist that she clicks to tally up the day’s finds, and a dedicated outfit she throws in the wash every time she returns from one of these expeditions as cigarette butts “smell like vomit.”
The litter she picks up goes in her own garbage at a home south of Quinpool.
“No one else is going to pick it up, it doesn’t belong on the ground and if I don’t do something, nothing is ever really going to be done,” Vikedal said.
GARBAGE TO GAS
She’s deeply curious about a Chester company called Sustane Technologies that’s making bio-fuels out of garbage instead of putting it into a landfill.
“They put it through a processor which essentially cooks it and turn it into fuel,” Vikedal said.
“It would be really amazing if Halifax were able to invest in a facility like they have in Chester instead of further filling the Otter Lake Landfill.”
At first during her walks, she wasn’t picking up cigarette butts.
“They are so small and there are so many of them,” Vikedal said.
“But that’s what made me really interested in it, I think ... And the more I looked into it, cigarette butts are the most-found piece of litter everywhere.”
‘THEY’RE GOING TO COME BACK TO US’
Because they’re made from a fine plastic that looks almost like cotton, they break apart easily, she said. “The problem with that is as plastics break off into smaller and smaller pieces, they pick up more surface area compared to their volume, which means that they can absorb more harmful things, essentially. And with them being cigarette butts, which are already catching a lot of arsenic and formaldehyde and all those nasty things that are coming out of cigarettes, all of that is getting absorbed into these little plastic bits which are then ending up in our water system and our soil. And they’re going to come back to us one day.”
Growing up in a small town, Vikedal didn’t see litter as a huge problem.
“There’s not enough people where I lived. It wasn’t so prominent. And the more I walked around Halifax, I was just so shocked with how much litter is everywhere. And it has absolutely increased with COVID, with personal protective equipment like masks and gloves and disinfectant wipes. It is insane to me how much garbage just ends up on the ground wherever. No one wants that.”
“Honestly, it was a way for me to get outside and run into people, chat with people and really meet some dogs because I miss mine at home.”
Quinn Vikedal
‘PEOPLE LIKE NUMBERS’
She hopes the data she’s gathering along with the trash will help change attitudes toward littering.
“People like numbers,” Vikedal said. “People like tangible kinds of things, and that’s what’s going to make people change their minds.”
Vikedal - who documents her litter-collecting treks on Instagram under the handle @trashqueenchronicles - has a summer job lined up in Alberta researching crop diseases, and she’s heading for England to study for a while after that. But she hopes to return next summer and turn the numbers she’s collected while picking up garbage into “a proper research project.”
That will likely involve finding a research partner to help handle the cart while she counts items going into it, and “tightening up my study space to maybe just Quinpool,” she said. “Because then it will be easier to get conclusions and answers from something instead of working with too many things at once. I would really love to do that.”