North Sails crew hauls off big load of litter

Within 30-45 minutes North Sails crew picked up five truckloads of trash Wednesday along Heybourne Road.

It was a cleaning day launched within the company world-wide to help make a difference and pick up waste along beaches and water or the general public.

“North Sails is moving into the ESG world,” said General Manager Per Andersson. “We have been asked to do a service day and engage our employees in helping promote a cleaner environment.”

Teams throughout the company world-wide are participating in the clean-up program.

“Most companies are located near water so they’ve focused on cleaning up the water and beaches, we decided to clean up the neighborhood since our closest water source would be Tahoe and it was just more doable down here,” said North Sails Minden Employee Jessica Schumanh.

Since North Sails Nevada is located in the high desert, Andersson said their focus area was different, but the lessons of the project will make for a cleaner environment in any area.

“Being a company that has close ties to water, it makes sense that others would focus on the water ways, beaches, etc. and keep clean water to enjoy, but the lessons we learn regardless will make things a lot more efficient and we will be able to identify how much is actually recycled and how much ends up at the landfill and make improvements based on that. What we learned during this service day will help us with future projects.”

Fifty employees from both North Sails buildings, separated in groups of 4-8 set out to clean the highways and surrounding areas of the business along Heybourne Road, Johnson Lane, Starbucks Way and Business Parkway.

“The teams were actually surprised to see how much was out there,” said Andersson. “It was actually pretty shocking.

Andersson said 100 trash bags were collected containing cigarette butts, a lot of plastic drinking bottles, cans, fast food wrappers and cups.

“On top of that there was cardboard, wood crates, drawers, organic things to a certain extent, but we picked up anything that looked out of place,” said Andersson.

Andersson said in general the feedback received from employees who participated in the clean-up project was positive and the team is on board to continue the efforts.

“We will continue this project as needed when we see trash littering the roadsides,” he said. “We also hope to have some impact on other companies and individuals in the industrial area and in the Valley in general.”