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Local resident continues community cleaning mission in Mill Creek

May 21, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Joshua Drakes

Orangeville resident Terry Brooker has taken it upon himself to clean up Mill Creek, a defining waterway that helped shape the town, which, in his view, has been neglected for far too long.

Motivated by concern for the environment and frustration with inaction, Brooker waded into the creek to haul out debris that had built up over the years. After clearing hundreds of pounds of garbage from other areas of Mill Creek, around Dragonfly Park, he said the section between Bythia and Dawson is the worst he’s ever seen.

“The last time I passed by here, I just couldn’t ignore what I was seeing down there,” he said. “We need to be paying attention to this, we can’t ignore this, so I just took it upon myself to get in there and do something about all the garbage that’s been thrown in here.”

He hopes his efforts will draw attention to the state of the river and spur both the town and residents to take more responsibility.

Over the course of his work, Brooker has pulled out hundreds of pounds of material, much of it soaked with water and silt, indicating how long it remained in the waterway.

He describes finding “almost everything you would expect not to be in a river.”

“We definitely have quite a selection of items,” Brooker said. “We have a lot of clothing, a lot of comforters and blankets, and they weigh hundreds of pounds because of saturated water and silt. We got Javex bottles, all sorts of cans and plastics of all sorts of shapes, styrofoam, and shoes, frying pans, electronics, everything you can think of, it’s here.”

Brooker said that the current state of Mill Creek comes despite a $1.3‑million town investment a decade ago that focused on debris removal, rock work, erosion control, and planting native trees and shrubs.

He said that conditions have since deteriorated again, as a result of human impact. The Town of Orangeville’s Parks team is only able to respond to large items abandoned in the waterways when called, and doesn’t have the resources for consistent cleaning efforts, meaning that pollution can go unaddressed unless reported.

In the spring, the team said it pulled out enough garbage to fill four two-ton garbage trucks, but Brooker said that it’s just not consistent enough with the amount of garbage consistently deposited into the river.

“There was some hope there 10 years ago when they invested over a million dollars into cleaning up the debris, but it looks to me like it’s been neglected,” he said. “We shouldn’t be seeing these things in our rivers, our waterways. There’s the spring water runoff, but this isn’t spring water runoff. This is neglect, this is littering, and there’s no other excuse for it.”

Brooker said that local residents have pointed to both individual behaviour and infrastructure as contributing factors. He also noted dumpsters along the creek behind nearby plazas, with no fences or barriers to stop windblown garbage from entering the water.

“I look at the plazas here and all the dumpsters all along the riverbank,” he said. “There’s no fence or barriers from the river to there… I guess people are pretty carefree with their garbage sometimes, and it just blows right in the river, from the plazas.”

Brooker believes a combination of enforcement, better dumpster placement and regular community cleanups could restore the creek.

He also suggests that organized efforts at least twice a year — in spring and fall — could keep Mill Creek close to pristine and make the return of healthy fish populations a realistic goal.

“Already, just on my own, I’ve pulled a lot out of the water,” he said. “I think we can have a community effort here, two days a year to do something with this river, once in the spring, once in the fall. This river could be pristine, and we could brag about speckled trout in the river downtown.”

Regardless of whether a community forms around the Mill Creek, Brooker plans to continue his mission to clean up public spaces across town, and while he doesn’t view himself as a leader, he said that anyone interested is welcome to join him.

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