On Feb. 27, NPO Arakawa Clean Aid Forum held its annual reporting session, and I am pleased to announce that Tokyo River Friends, which is a Jambo International group, received two awards. One was for the most trash removed from the Arakawa in 2019, and the other was for the most number of clean up events held. About 100 individuals participated in 19 TRF events on the Arakawa this past year, and I would like to sincerely thank all of these people for their time and efforts that made these accomplishments possible while at the same time making our local environment a better place. I would also like to thank Arakawa Clean Aid for its continuing support, which has included providing about one-third of the participants through its announcement of our events in addition to providing the trash bags and arranging for the trash to be collected by local governments.
To put these results in perspective, Arakawa Clean Aid, which as been in operation for 26 years now, supports roughly 150 clean up events per year by about 100 different groups (don’t have the exact numbers). Nearly all of these are once or twice a year by a company, school, community group, etc. while TRF is one of if not the only group that is active on a monthly basis. Total trash collected through all of these efforts in 2019 was just under 8,000 bags while TRF was credited with 1,087 of those along with 335 pieces of large trash. (Note that the TRF counting method is slightly different as we make a conservative bag estimate for the large unbagged items.) Then, 3 of our 19 Arakawa events last year were not included in that data (e.g., outside the coverage range, etc.) So, our own count was actually 1,531 bags, which includes large items. Afterwards a few people went to a nearby isakaya for a nijikai.
Details of the reporting session are here in Japanese.
https://cleanaid.jp/activity-report/2020/03/houkokurenraku19-20.html
