Community volunteers cleaning up the City of Greater Sudbury

Old coffee cups, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers and more. With most of the snow in the city melted, the garbage is showing.

Different community groups are now taking on the task of cleaning up.

The Junction Creek Stewardship Committee has been cleaning the urban areas of Junction Creek — from Garson to Kelly Lake Road for the past 20 years.

"It not only helps the environment and the wildlife that are living in the area but it also helps the community," Miranda Virtanen, the executive director of the committee said.

"It promotes water quality and it has that esthetic value as well, a clean area people are more likely to respect it and not litter."

Junction Creek volunteers will be meeting at the New Sudbury Centre on April 28 at 10 a.m. for a spring clean-up.

Virtanen says the committee has kept a lot of garbage out of the creek over the years.

"We find everything and depending on the location it does change, so some area's there's a lot more clothes for instance," she said.

"In general, it's a lot of plastic wrappers, disposable cutlery and cups and you find random things that we've collected over the years, sometimes really large items like tires, shopping carts are really common as well."

Memorial Park will also be getting cleaned up over the weekend as Fierté Sudbury Pride is hosting its first clean-up event on Sunday.

"We felt like we wanted to kind of give back to different communities, because obviously LGBT people exist in all sorts of communities in all sorts of intersections and we felt like we wanted to give back to the city and participate in a clean up that was going to contribute the use and the happiness of all kinds of other folks," said Lee Czechowski, the vice-chair of Fierté Sudbury Pride.

Czechowski says Pride hopes to continue doing clean-ups around the city.

"I think that it's just really important to recognize that we exist in all of these different communities, we participate in all of these different communities and we're going to be using this space and it's kind of like a campsite rule, we want to come in and leave it in better shape than what we left it," they said.

"It's really important to show that we want to participate in the maintenance of the space and of the city that we live in and the spaces that we live in and also contribute to the health and well being of other folks who might use that space as well."

Junction Creek will have another clean-up event on May 4 at 10 a.m., meeting at the Real Canadian Superstore.