The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) is looking for volunteers to help with this year’s Great Pennsylvania Cleanup on Saturday, April 19.
For 30 years, PennDOT has identified April as its annual spring litter pick-up month, and every fourth Saturday in April was designated Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful Day. The day was marked by volunteers coming out to assist in the statewide clean-up effort by picking up litter along roadsides, in parks and in other areas.
Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful Day has since merged with other statewide cleanup efforts to become the Great Pennsylvania Cleanup. Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians team together each year to make this effort the largest state administered volunteer effort in the nation.
Last year, over 128,757 citizens from across the Commonwealth joined in the litter pick-up effort, gathering over 372,096 bags of litter and debris. Volunteers who wish to participate in the annual cleanup effort must register at www.GreatPACleanup.org and are provided with orange safety vests, gloves, litter bags and a waiver to take their trash to a local landfill for disposal. If a person or group cannot participate on April 19 they may choose any other day until the end of May.
Groups who participate in PennDOT’s popular Adopt-A-Highway (AAH) program are also encouraged to use GPC Day for one of their annual pick-up days. The AAH program, which began in 1990, involves individuals, groups, or corporations that adopt a two-mile section of a highway for two years and collect litter on it at least four times a year. In PennDOT’s District 9, which covers Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Fulton, Huntingdon, and Somerset, there are 308 AAH groups with approximately 6,195 volunteers. Last year those groups cleaned 1,245 miles of roadway by picking up 15,916 bags of litter.
Contact Todd Homan at 814-696-6838 for more information.
