NCSU Students to Clean Roadsides in Great American Cleanup

3/30/2005

On Saturday, April 2, Wake County Keep America Beautiful (KAB) will partner with 500 N.C. State University student volunteers to pick up litter on the Capital Boulevard Beltline cloverleaf and along the entire length of Yonkers Road from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The cleanup is one of many activities during the annual Keep America Beautiful Great American Cleanup, a nationwide effort from March until May to improve local community environments.

During the recent KAB Litter Index – a visual assessment of litter throughout Wake County – the Capital Boulevard and Yonkers Road area won the dubious distinction of being the worst littered roadside in the county. By Saturday afternoon, the NCSU Service Raleigh volunteers and KAB intend to reverse that image and make the area the cleanest roadside in the County. The students, sporting their Service Raleigh T-shirts and lots of determination, will remove the garbage carelessly discarded by others along the roadside. Volunteers will bag up the plastic sheeting, buckets, work gloves, paper packaging, insulation, chunks of wood, lunch leftovers and other debris.

Following the cleanup, Wake County Keep America Beautiful will ask local law enforcement agencies to increase their enforcement of littering laws throughout the county. An estimated 75-90 percent of roadside litter comes from uncovered trucks, so special emphasis will be on enforcement of the secured load laws. Such littering poses a safety hazard as well as an appearance and economic development issue.

Last year, 400 Service Raleigh volunteers partnered with KAB to clean up 22 Beltline cloverleafs. Founded in 1998 by the Park Scholars and the NCSU student government, Service Raleigh is an annual, one-day event designed to foster in its participants both a lasting dedication to serve and a consistent commitment to the community. During the 2004 Great American Cleanup, more than 2,200 volunteers committed five hours of their time and effort back to the community for an estimated 11,000 man-hours of work. To put this into perspective, at 40 hours a week, it would take one person until the summer of 2009 to accomplish that work!

For more information please contact Wake County Keep America Beautiful at 856-6779 or visit NCSU Service Raleigh at www.ncsu.edu/serviceraleigh and Keep America Beautiful at http://www.kab.org/programs.asp?id=291&rid=68.

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