The River Clean-Up

For many years the small river that runs through Greenfield was badly polluted. People threw plastic bottles, bags, and other rubbish into the water, and the fish slowly disappeared. The local children were warned never to swim there.\n\nLast spring a teenager named Sofia decided that something had to change. She used social media to invite her neighbours to join a clean-up day. She did not expect many people, but on a sunny Saturday morning more than eighty volunteers arrived with gloves and bags.\n\nThey worked for six hours and collected over a thousand kilograms of waste. A local company gave them free water and food, and a recycling centre agreed to take most of the rubbish. By the evening the riverbank looked completely different.\n\nThe event did not solve every problem, but it changed people's attitudes. The town council promised to place more bins near the river and to clean it twice a year. A few months later, someone spotted small fish swimming in the clearer water again. Sofia was proud, though she knew that protecting the environment would need everyone's effort for a long time.