Written by: Jason Jiang
Led by: Kevin Chen, Grace Liu, Jason Jiang
On March 17th, 2017, early in the morning, the Pearland Branch brought over 30 volunteers to the Stella Roberts Recycling Center. At the recycling center, Abbey Stripling, a representative of the city’s Keep Pearland Beautiful initiative, brought us along for a tour, where the volunteers and parents learned various things about the processes of recycling paper, glass, and large appliances just to name a few. We also learned little-known, yet very important practices to maintain a clean and healthy environment.
After our tour of the recycling center, we were brought to the John Hargrove Environmental Complex and Trail right behind the center, where we met with the city’s urban forester, Jerry Bradshaw, and another representative of KPB, Cullen Ondracek. Here, we split up into two teams. One team worked with Mr. Bradshaw, uprooting dead trees, planting new trees, and placing stakes to support trees that are falling over. The other team worked with Mr. Ondracek to weed an area near the trail to plant various native flowering plants. This area would act as a pollinator garden, where various pollinators such as bees or butterflies would come to cross-pollinate the flora. The volunteers did such a great job that our supervisors from KPB asked us to come back regularly to help maintain the area! All of the volunteers and parents learned many new things and had a great time “keeping Pearland Beautiful.”
Our volunteers were: Ethan Chen, Kevin Chen, Caleb Ci, Nicholas Doan, Kathryn Guan, Jerry Gu, William He, Allen Jiang, Jason Jiang, Cindy Li, William Li, Kathy Liang, Grace Liu, Tony Liu, Han Lu, Jayden Lu, Karen Lu, Aruna Muthupillai, Vidya Muthupillai, Adith Ram, Kevin Tong, Quang Truong, Hans Wang, Lisa Wei, Vincent Yang, and Katherine Zhong. We also had various parents helping out at this event too!
