On Earth Day this year, Saturday, April 22nd, we held our third consecutive Earth Day litter cleanup. Like last year, we did more than one cleanup during Earth Week, and we had other events and participated in other activities during the month.

Our 3rd Birthday

April 8th was our 3rd birthday! Waste-Free Dayton was started as a Facebook group by Natalie on April 8, 2020. It was a little over a year later when we decided to officially form an entity and then later become a 501(c)(3) charity. We weren’t able to celebrate our birthday on the 8th, but we had a wonderful cake from Eat the Rich later in the month at our bingo night.

Good Day Dayton Appearance

We had our 7th appearance on Good Day Dayton, and our first of 2023. Brett shared with Tej the fact about the modern day plastic toothbrush, that every toothbrush ever made still exists. The more sustainable alternative is to switch to a bamboo toothbrush. You can watch the clip here: https://dayton247now.com/good-day-dayton/kick-off-to-earth-dayton-at-2nd-street-market#

Sock Recycling

We were approached by Up and Running to help them promote a sock recycling program taking place at both of their stores in Dayton and Troy during the month. We love initiatives like this one and we hope to see more of this going forward!

Earth DayTON Kickoff

Waste-Free Dayton was one of the many groups and organizations participating in the Earth DayTON 2023 initiative, a collaboration between the City of Dayton, Five Rivers Metroparks, and other. We had a table at the kickoff event at the 2nd Street Market on April 16th, and despite some bad weather in the early afternoon, we had a great time being there and engaging with market-goers.

Charity Bingo at Yellow Cab

We hope to continue this tradition in the years to come, having a charity bingo night the week of Earth Day. Thanks again to Yellow Cap and The Pizza Bandit for doing this event for local nonprofits, and for inviting us back a 3rd time. Looking forward to our next bingo night? Save the date for Tuesday, December 5th!

Volunteer of the Quarter

This was long overdue. We couldn’t do our monthly litter cleanups without our volunteers, so starting this year, we will be recognizing a Volunteer of the Quarter four times per year. For the 1st quarter, we recognized Aileen Hull, who attended our January and March cleanup, and wrote a guest blog post for us on the energy credits available under the IRA. Thanks Aileen!

Pre-Earth Day Litter Cleanup with Ohlmann Group

Local marketing firm Ohlmann Group approached us earlier in the year and asked if we could plan a volunteer event for their employees in April. What better week to a litter cleanup than Earth Week! Callie and Brett enjoyed leading this cleanup and being with this hard-working group of Ohlmann employees. The group picked up 20 bags of trash in under 2 hours!

Living City Project Citywide Litter Cleanups

Waste-Free Dayton has been one of the Living City Project partners since 2022, and this year we were able to host one of the 20+ cleanup events on Earth Day as part of the Living City Project citywide cleanups. Our group of 20 volunteers picked up 64 bags of trash and collected numerous bulky items and debris for pickup by City of Dayton Waste Collection. Overall, 128 tons of trash and debris were picked up by over 700 volunteers in 22 neighborhoods. Incredible! Thank you Crossroads Dayton for sending a group of volunteers to our cleanup! To see the promo video for this year’s Living City Project, in which Brett from Waste-Free Dayton and Catie Derenzo from Crossroads were asked to participate, you can find it here: https://declare.org/livingcityproject.

After the cleanup, we enjoyed lunch hosted by the Dream Center, and then visited our friends Pink Moon Good and Reduce & Reuse Refillery for their Earth Day events.

Relaunch of the Don’t be a Litterbug campaign

Our last activity of the month was being invited to the relaunch of the Don’t be a Litterbug campaign at the Dayton Metro Library West Dayton branch. The goals of this campaign are to get more people to routinely pick up the trash in their neighborhoods and to engage the youth.

Next Month

Our May litter cleanup is currently being planned, our next fundraiser is at Nowhere in Particular on Friday, May 19th, we will be presenting to almost 500 4th and 5th grade students, and part of the WFD team will be attending the Midwest Sustainability Summit in Cincinnati on the 12th. It won’t be quite as busy as April, but these will all be impactful and important events nonetheless!

Earth Month 2023 Recap