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Spotlight - Penn State Extension: Are You Keeping PA Beautiful?
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It takes a lot of work to clean up a watershed area and keep it clean. If your watershed is facing a lot of illegal dumps, or abandoned tire piles you will want to learn about an organization called “Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful.” Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful is the result of two organizations with similar missions joining together to achieve a common vision, a clean and beautiful Pennsylvania. In 2010, PA CleanWays (1990) and Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful (2003) merged to become the new Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful whose mission is empowering Pennsylvanians to make our communities clean and beautiful.
Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful is the state affiliate of Keep America Beautiful, Inc., the nation’s largest volunteer-based community action and education organization. To learn more, visit the Keep America Beautiful, Inc. website.
One example of what a Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful Chapter Affiliate can do is in McKean County. There are a lot of organizations working together to make this affiliate successful.
Penn State Extension Educator, Jim Clark, was one of the leaders who founded PA CleanWays of McKean County, an affiliate of Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful, in the year 2000.
Since that time with the help of Penn State Extension, municipal officials, McKean County Conservation District, McKean County Adult Probation, citizen volunteers, the Department of Environmental Protection, and several others this affiliate has removed over 141 tons of trash from over 30 illegal dumps and over 26,000 abandoned tires. In addition, the group has sponsored three unwanted medication collection events to date.
On April 30, the McKean affiliate sponsored the National DEA Drug Take Back Program in the county.
On June 181, the affiliate removed 1,000 tires for recycling and next will be an electronic recycling event on July 30.
Keep PA Beautiful has a lot of resources and information available to help you and your watershed organization safely and successfully clean up an illegal dump, recycle abandoned tires, recycle electronics, or conduct other volunteer efforts aimed at making Pennsylvania beautiful.
It takes all of us working together to keep Pennsylvania beautiful, but when we do, we also benefit by protecting Pennsylvania water resources from contamination.
(Written By: Jim Clark, Extension Educator, McKean County, reprinted from the Watershed Winds Newsletter.)\
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7/25/2011 |
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