This group of retirees spend their golden years protecting the environment

Some people spend their retirement traveling or playing golf, but the volunteers with Philadelphia’s Senior Environment Corps see themselves as watchdogs for the local environment.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Some people spend their retirement playing golf. Others travel. In Philadelphia, the retirees in the Senior Environment Corps see themselves as watchdogs for the local environment. WHYY’s Sophia Schmidt reports.

SOPHIA SCHMIDT, BYLINE: Bob Meyer is 71 years old. He retired from a career as a biology professor, but he still likes to keep busy.

BOB MEYER: The horrible lure of retirement is to do nothing, and, you know, that’s no good because you just end up vegetating at home watching, you know, daytime TV, and I don’t want to do that.

SCHMIDT: Instead, Meyer volunteers with the Senior Environment Corps in northwest Philadelphia. The group of more than a dozen retirees take on projects like sampling the soil and testing the area’s waterways for pollution. Today, Meyer is in a lab at a local college. He’s looking through a microscope, counting tiny pieces of plastic – or microplastics – from a sample of creek water.

MEYER: OK. I got a pretty sharp view now.

SCHMIDT: He finds tiny pieces with jagged edges and thin, plastic fibers.

MEYER: Ah. Got a thread, and it’s pink, so I know it’s plastic.

SCHMIDT: Altogether, Meyer finds dozens of pieces of microplastics in this one small sample of creek water.

MEYER: I don’t know how you get it out. I know how you stop it. You stop using plastic. But that’s – I’ll – we’ll be pushing up the daisies before that stops.

SCHMIDT: It’s not all counting plastics in the lab. Some volunteers wade into streams to collect water samples. Others teach kids how to identify aquatic critters. Meyer and fellow volunteer David Schogel say the group is always looking for new members to join.

Anything you’re particularly looking for in people who join?

MEYER: Youth (laughter).

DAVID SCHOGEL: If they’re breathing…

(LAUGHTER)

MEYER: Yeah.

SCHOGEL: …We want them.

SCHMIDT: Schogel is 85 and a retired social worker. He sees the nearly three decades he’s volunteered with the Senior Environment Corps as part of his legacy.

SCHOGEL: I’m not a wealthy fellow, and I don’t have any money to leave behind to any groups or even my family, but I can leave a better world.

SCHMIDT: The group meets monthly at a senior center. That’s where 74-year-old Eleanor Lundy-Wade found out about it. She’s a former health inspector and public health educator.

ELEANOR LUNDY-WADE: I said, they’re seniors that love and do the environment? I said, I want to be one of them.

SCHMIDT: Fred Lewis helped found the group more than 30 years ago. At 98, he’s the oldest member. He says the corps has been testing water quality for years, but looking for microplastics is new. Lewis is old enough to remember back when plastic first became widely used.

FRED LEWIS: I mean, it was just something that was so new that people were just trying to get suggestions as how we can take advantage of it. And now it’s how we can end it.

SCHMIDT: Lewis says some people might assume that the older you get, the less involved with society you become, but he hopes this group changes some minds.

UNIDENTIFIED VOLUNTEER: At the count of three.

SCHMIDT: At the end of every meeting, the volunteers close by singing the Senior Environment Corps song.

UNIDENTIFIED VOLUNTEERS: (Singing) Wissahickon to the banks of Darby Creek.

SCHMIDT: For NPR News, I’m Sophia Schmidt in Philadelphia.

UNIDENTIFIED VOLUNTEERS: (Singing) Water and the testing faithfully. We are tracking down pollution. And we wish we could do more. We are proud to bear the title of the Senior Environment Corps.

(CLAPPING)

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