Locals in cleanup & beautification

Special to Wesson News

As spring, sunlight, and warm days return, locals are joining like-minded folk across the nation who are rolling up their sleeves in the fight to beautify public spaces.

On Saturday, April 5, Wesson residents, encouraged by Keep Copiah Beautiful (KCB), will walk through town to pick up litter and recyclable materials and take to dumpsters.

The occasion is the month-long observance of Keep America Beautiful Month in which American will participate in a variety ways.  Locally, KOB is focused on Keep America Beautiful’s Great American Cleanup, a program which communities join throughout the year.  Other Americans in other areas will “plog” – picking up litter as the jog; challenging themselves with the “BeRecycled Pledge,” committing to “the Triple R” – “reduce, reuse and recycle” to give as second life to what they want to throw away; planting trees as part of RETREET to both beautify the environment and rebuild ecosystems; starting to live “zero-waste” lifestyles towards creating healthier, more sustainable, less littered communities.

Keep America Beautiful Month, dedicated to improving public spaces through action and education, is a call to action to reduce litter on streets, parks, or roads; prevent future littering through educational events, and beautify communities.

KOB is rallying Wesson participants to respond to the call by giving them gloves to pick up litter safely and bags to carry it to two dumpsters that Town Aldermen have agreed to strategically locate. 

The idea is that small actions can have big effects, and littering has far-reaching consequences. Not only are there over 50 million pieces of litter in the US – with more than 2,000 pieces per mile, but over half of them are actually found in waterways and ocean shores. The human issue of littering also affects faraway ecosystems and species of animals and plants. In a recent survey, 90% of Americans said that litter is a problem in their states, so this is the perfect time to educate our communities on the environmental repercussions of littering, as well as the insufficient trees and green spaces in the US – and start planting.

Keep American Beautiful Foundation and the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America started Keep America Beautiful Month in 1971  as “Scouting Keep America Beautiful Day” to encourage a massive national cleanup and recycling movement in the same month as Earth Day and Arbor Day and catalyze collective action that benefits the environment. 

Keep America Beautiful Month was changed to a weeklong event in 1982 and, in 1984, it was extended to a full month dedicated to the reduction of waste, prevention of litter, and beautification of communities nationwide.  Today, the event involves 700 state and local partners, as well as millions of volunteers who seek to take greater responsibility for their public spaces and build an America where everyone lives in a beautiful community. 

                        SIDEBAR

Keep America Beautiful facts:

• Cleanup Impacts: Since the start of the Great American Cleanup part of Keep America Beautiful Month, it  has engaged millions of volunteers who have collected over 23 million pounds of litter across 5.3 million hours of community involvement. They beautified 66,300 miles of streets, parks, and roads. In 2024, they planted over 71,000 bulbs and plants: shrubs, flowers, and trees.

• Doing Your Part: There are about 50 billion pieces of litter across the US, and if every American picked up 152 pieces, we would clean it all up.

• Cigarette Litter: The Keep America Beautiful National Litter Study found cigarette butts to be the number one littered item, accounting for 9.7 billion butts on any given day across the US.  For 21 years, the Cigarette Litter Prevention Program has established litter stands in more than 1,800 communities.