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Published on December 4th, 2008

86 Million Pounds of Litter Off the Streets

by Trey Granger

Keep America Beautiful (KAB) released the results of the 2008 Great American Cleanup™ held from March through May. Through the help of three million volunteers in 17,000 communities, over 150,000 miles of roads and trails and 91,000 acres of parks and public land were improved.

Called “Fight Dirty,” this year’s Cleanup collected over 86 million pounds of litter. Among the waste collected and recycled were 189 million PET bottles, 37 million pounds of newspapers, 10.2 million pounds of aluminum and steel and 5.3 million pounds of electronics.

The campaign also removed 15,200 trashed cars and cleaned up 37,000 grafittied areas. All this litter was replaced with playgrounds, trees and gardens.

In addition to cleaning up roads and parks, the Cleanup targeted rivers, lakes, shorelines and wetlands. It’s estimated that 6.7 million volunteer hours were committed to the 2008 event.

Trey Granger

Trey Granger

Trey Granger is a staff member at Earth911.com.

More articles by Trey


4 Comments

  1. faith rossell

    posted on December 7th, 2008 at 10:39 am

    Trey,
    I found this article about your magnificant project by way of Preserve Everyday. Could you send me a way to contact you. Are you going to do this 2009?

  2. Trey Granger

    Trey Granger

    posted on December 8th, 2008 at 9:32 am

    Faith,

    This campaign is actually run by Keep America Beautiful, and is held every year so there is definitely an opportunity to get involved. Visit http://kab.org to get in touch with an affiliate in your area. If you have other questions, you can email me at tgranger@earth911.com.

    Trey

  3. Winners of National Recycling Program | Green Eco Services

    posted on March 4th, 2009 at 8:27 am

    [...] U.S. Conference of Mayors, Novelis Inc. and Keep America Beautiful, Inc. (KAB) recently announced the winners in the fifth annual “Cans for Cash: City Recycling [...]

  4. Keep America Beautiful: Great American Cleanup Begins - Earth911.com

    posted on April 17th, 2009 at 1:38 pm

    [...] 3 marked the national launch of the 2009 Keep America Beautiful (KAB) Great American Cleanup. Focusing on the message that “Green Starts Here,” KAB [...]

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