Company stages cleanup in westside neighbourhood

By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on September 30, 2023.

The Zeno Renewables team cleaned in and around the coulee behind the Heritage neighbourhood as a part of their #CityCleanUp initiative on Saturday. Herald photo by Justin Seward

Zeno Renewables brought its #CityCleanUp initiative to Lethbridge for the first time on last weekend.

Between company employees and a couple of people from the public, they walked throughout the coulee behind the Heritage neighbourhood picking up garbage.

Zeno has been doing the #CityCleanUp initiative for a while now in larger cities with the aim of educating citizens about climate issues and encourage them to assist in making where they live a cleaner place.

“So one of our team members, Frances Teves, who runs our marketing team came up with an idea I think it was about six years ago now, where we could actually make a really positive impact on our community by getting our hands a little bit dirty, and showing that the areas that we’re in, even though they’re clean, might not actually be as clean as we think they are,” said Gursh Bal, co-CEO of Zeno Renewables with Kai Fahrion.

“So we created something called #CityCleanup and we’ve done I think well over 10 now. And the whole idea behind the #CityCleanUp is to pick a nice area, to grab a bunch of volunteers, whether it’d be from our team or our community, including our clients, and spend a Saturday morning out there in the area, pick up as much garbage as we can to make the environment cleaner and then post it online.”

The reason the clean-up is posted online is for awareness.

“To let people know that we can do more, we can be better, and as a society we need to come together and keep on doing our part to keep our planet healthy and clean,” said Bal.

Compared to the bigger cities, Bal believes Lethbridge is a lot cleaner and people are a lot nicer.

“It’s not that people in big cities aren’t nice,” he said.

“It’s just that people in Lethbridge are extra nice. Everybody says hi to you, they say thank you for cleaning up. We’re finding some pretty interesting garbage as well too. I know we found some radio stuff and we’re making a pretty good haul today so far and there’s quite a few people out here. But ultimately compared to some of the larger cities that we operate in, Lethbridge is really clean and the people are really nice.”

The company has done 10 clean-ups in six years which they figured to amount to 200 garbage bags’ worth.

Zeno Renewables’ goal is to install solar on one million Canadian homes by 2040, which is reduction of 10.8 per cent of Canada’s electrical carbon emissions.