On Earth Day, volunteers around the state picked up trash and debris Thursday at six events sponsored by Keep America Beautiful, with more than a dozen more planned for the weekend.
Littering seems to be up this year, mostly from personal protective equipment like masks, said Robyn Taylor, volunteer program manager for the Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission, a division of the Arkansas Department of Parks, Heritage and Tourism.
"Our numbers of cleanups and volunteers is about triple what is was last year," Taylor said. "During covid, we had to cancel the spring cleanup last year, so this year it seems like people are more anxious to get outdoors and get things looking clean, green and beautiful again."
The University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service and University of Arkansas at Little Rock partnered to clean up Little Rock's Coleman Creek on Thursday afternoon as part of Earth Day celebrations. As volunteers arrived, John Pennington, extension water quality educator, explained that the creek is a tributary of Fourche Creek, which flows into the Arkansas River, the Mississippi River and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico.
"What we do here has an impact all the way down," he said. "These cleanups alone don't solve the problem, but it definitely treats the symptom and leads to some immediate improvements and it does lead to awareness and education."
At a Coleman Creek cleanup in the fall, volunteers removed more than 750 pounds of improperly discarded trash and debris from a mile-long stretch.
Bulky items -- such as tires, steel and shopping carts -- added poundage, but Pennington said those larger items were nowhere near as numerous as plastic and plastic foam, "which is just near impossible to get all of."
Each spring from March through May, Arkansas participates in Keep America Beautiful's Great American Cleanup, the nation's largest community improvement effort.
Taylor said 2020, with the many canceled cleanups, was a fluke year. During 2019, around 7,000 volunteers worked more than 28,000 hours across the state. Over the course of 179 events, they collected 153,343 pounds of litter from 862 miles of roadway, 123 miles of waterway and shorelines and 1,368 acres of parks and public areas, she said.
The events also helped to recycle 3,868 tires and 58,711 pounds of electronics.
While some events focus on cleaning up public community spaces, White County's twice-yearly cleanup encourages residents to gather any trash from their properties and drop it off, free of charge, at Davidsonville Historic State Park from Thursday through Saturday. It's especially helpful for rural residents who pay separately for trash pickup, said Holly Pulley, event organizer and White County Road Department assistant.
Last spring, the cleanup gathered 2,361 tires, 100 tons of trash and around 88 tons of metal, Pulley said.
Litter often is trash thrown out of vehicles or blown from truck beds as well as illegal dumping, which can poison groundwater and kill wildlife, according to Keep Arkansas Beautiful.
It's also costly.
The Arkansas Department of Transportation spent almost $5 million on trash pickup, which totaled about 46,850 cubic yards of litter, in fiscal 2020, department spokesman Dave Parker said.
"That's the problem, if people would just think before they throw -- we'd have less litter to deal with and could spend that money and manpower on other needs," Parker said.
To report littering, residents can call (866) 811-1222, which goes to an answering service that relays the information to the Arkansas Highway Police. Trash problems also can be reported at IDriveArkansas.com.
More information on cleanup events this weekend and other dates can be found online at keeparkansasbeautiful.com/get-involved/events/.
