Jack Hudson

RESIDENTS gathered in Andrews Farm on the first weekend of March to help Clean Up Australia.

More than 40 people attended the event, including Senator Alex Antic and Playford Mayor Glenn Docherty, with members from the community, Playford Uniting Church and the local Bhutanese community through the Punya Foundation being involved.

Organiser Liam Goodrich was delighted with the turnout, labelling it the most successful event he had run.

"Back in 2019, I launched my own community projects initiative called ‘Clean Up Playford City’,” he said.

“What influenced me to actually launch this was, back in 2019, I participated in the Clean Up Australia Day with the Rotary Club.

“I’m now actually the treasurer of the Rotary Club of Elizabeth.

“I was at the clean-up at the time and we were doing it at Smithfield Plains and I thought to myself ‘this will be a really good thing to have as a regular thing throughout the City of Playford’.

“I called Clean Up Australia, and I said I’d love to launch my own community project, ‘would you be OK if I was to team up with you guys and I can actually run one my own events and my own project through you guys’ and they were happy to.

“Since 2019, I’ve completed almost 50 events, right throughout the City of Playford and the one that I just did only Clean Up Australia Day this year is actually the biggest event that I’ve actually held in the last two years.

“We had 65 people - that’s a massive increase from last year.”

Meanwhile, Mr Docherty said it was a great day to help clean up Australia.

“It is great to see so many people coming together to help clean up their local creek,” he said.

“My family and I enjoyed helping to clean up this site.

“Clean Up Australia Day is an important day but every day we can do our bit to help keep our environment clean.

“Well done to the Clean Up Playford City project, which has done over 40 clean-ups in the City of Playford.”

Clean Up Australia inspires and empowers communities to clean up, fix up and conserve the environment.

“What was started 30 years ago, by an ‘average Australian bloke’ who had a simple idea to make a difference in his own backyard has now become the nation’s largest community-based environmental
event,” Clean Up Australia’s website says.

More than 18.3 million Australians have donated their time as a part of Clean Up Australia Day over the past 30 years, with 36 million hours of volunteer time donated.