As a Michigan-based company, we take pride in preserving our natural resources. Surrounded by our beautiful Great Lakes, we find it incredibly fulfilling when we support our neighborhood beaches that welcome millions of visitors a year.
In our continuation to enrich lives in the communities we serve, our partnership with the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Unilever remained strong as their staff and our team members joined forces in cleaning up four major Michigan beaches earlier this spring. The cleanup locations included Pere Marquette Beach in Muskegon, Belle Isle Beach in Detroit, Grand Haven State Park and City Beach, and Muskegon State Park.
“Great Lakes stewardship is one of our key sustainability pillars, so taking care of these lakes is mission critical to us,” said Erik Petrovskis, Director of Environmental Compliance and Sustainability at Meijer. “Our work with the Alliance and Unilever is not just a partnership; it’s a promise to take care of our communities, strive for cleaner lakes, and in the words of Fred Meijer, ‘leave the world in a little better shape than when I entered it.’”
In total, across all four locations, 289 volunteers participated in the cleanup efforts. Volunteers not only actively collected litter, but they also had the opportunity to learn about this local issue. We know plastic cleanup has been on ocean coasts, but many don’t think about smaller, freshwater beaches. Our lakes are a major source for our communities. In fact, more than 40 million people rely on the Great Lakes for drinking water.
The cleanups were a huge success. More than 19,000 pieces of litter were collected, resulting in more than 300 pounds of litter removed from four of Michigan’s most visited beaches.
For more than 30 years, the Alliance’s Adopt-a-Beach program has activated thousands of volunteers in cleanups across all five Great Lakes. They remove tens of thousands of pounds of litter, primarily plastic, from Great Lakes shorelines each year. Since 2019, we’ve partnered with the Alliance, sponsoring various beach cleanup events across our footprint.
More recently, we expanded the deployment of two types of innovative litter capture and clean-up technologies, the BeBot and Pixie Drone, to 18 new locations along Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin lakeshores so we can have cleaner beaches year ‘round. Read more about our commitment here.
We look forward to our ongoing collaboration with the Alliance and Unilever for more coastal cleanups this fall.