This blog entry marks the beginning of a journey I am embarking on with my faithful companion Felix.  Felix is my 4-year-old sheepadoodle and he weighs in now close to 100 lbs.  We take walks together in the rural area where we live.  If I didn't take him for walks he would go crazy and I probably would too.  This has turned out to be a great way to get exercise and to get away from computer/phone screens.  It's one of the few times a day when I'm not plugged into anything but Felix, nature, and myself.  I never listen to anything during our walks to make sure I can hear traffic coming.  Here's a picture of us on one of our walks. 

During our walks, I noticed that there was an awful lot of trash along the various routes we take.  Needless to say, it made me very sad.  At first, I thought that if I just picked up one item every time we walked I would eventually pick up everything.  I do this on a regular basis when I'm out and about or at a national/state park hiking and I tried doing this for a short time.  After a few weeks, I quickly realized that picking up one item per walk wasn't going to cut it and I would never get it all.  Every time Felix would step in the taller grass of the ditch and I heard the crunching noise of old plastic beneath the layers, I couldn't help but cringe.  I decided that I need to something more or the layers of yuk would continue to mount from season to season.  Our current goal now is to pick up as much as we can fit in a bag every time we go out.  In a few short weeks we've made a lot of progress and I think we'll be able to get it all in our small area and then keep up with the new stuff that appears.  The first step of my plan by creating this blog is that it will inspire others to do the same thing.  Then little by little we can all do our part to make this world a cleaner/better place.  It will also keep me motivated to keep walking and get in better shape.  

The next part in my plan is to track what we're picking up each time we go out.  I haven't mentioned yet that I'm a data scientist and can't help but to document and track things. As my daughter commented to me today, only a data scientist would come back from picking up all of the trash and document what they found.  I figured while I'm going to all of the trouble picking up all of the trash I find, I'm going to bring it back and recycle things that can be recycled and keep track of everything I find.  The purpose of this blog isn't to point fingers at anyone for littering, although I wish they didn't.  My hope is that maybe if we know what types of things get thrown out of our cars windows everyday, we would then have data to back up the need to make those items compostable.  

Once I get through a few more weeks of tracking, I'll post a link to a downloadable blank spreadsheet incase anyone else wants to join me and track the stuff they pick up.  I'd love to create 'Felix's Crew' of people out there picking up trash to make the world a better place.  If you want to download the spreadsheet and then share the completed data back with me, I can consolidate it into a database.  This is what I do for a living anyway.  As we progress in our journey, I'll make a post each week of our progress and detail interesting items we find and nature that we encounter.  After I have more data I'll also share visualizations of the data I amass.  Here's a pick of the first bag of cans we picked up.

I do want to mention a few warnings to consider before you go out and start picking up trash yourself.  All of my immunizations are current and up to date.  You don't know what you might find out there.  A lot of what I pick up are empty alcoholic beverage containers, and with this being a rural area they are not being left out there by cyclist or other walkers.  People are driving and tossing these out of their vehicles or they could possibly fly out of the back of pick-up trucks.  So, I make sure not to walk with earbuds or headphones so that Felix and I can leave the road in favor of the ditch when we hear a car coming.  Safety is the most important factor.  If you see some trash out there, pick you up if you can.  The exercise will do you good and you'll be helping everyone.