Spring cleaning
Highways and byways of Butler County are about to get an overdue sprucing up.
Pick Up Pennsylvania, the Department of Transportation's annual effort to join with community volunteers to clean up litter from the road, is being conducted Friday in the county.
Community and civic associations, schools and youth groups, families and friends, businesses, hunting and fishing clubs, conservation organizations and other groups of volunteers are provided with bags, gloves and vests donated by PennDOT, the Department of Environmental Protection and Keep America Beautiful for cleaning up roads in what is normally an annual event. It was canceled last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2019, 724 volunteers conducted 58 Pick Up Pennsylvania road cleanup events and removed 16,171 pounds of trash from 101 miles of road in the county.
Volunteers are looking forward to the 2021 cleanup, but some residents don't wait for the state's organized effort to tidy up.
Rick and Valerie Alexander, of Butler Township, have been picking up litter from the sides of Litman Road near their home on brisk Sunday mornings in March for the past six years.
“This year, we picked up over fifteen 50-gallon garbage cans of garbage and recycling,” Rick Alexander said.The haul, picked up by the township public works department, included the expected items, such as bottles, fast-food bags and car parts as well as the latest in litter: face masks. The township also provides garbage bags.The first year the retired Alexanders cleaned up, they found auto body parts and other debris in a ravine between Litman Road and Butcher Run, a small stream that flows into the Connoquenessing Creek, where it looked like it had been lying for many years.They are glad they haven't had to negotiate the ravine since then, but they have kept cleaning up along the road.“We decided it would be our little mission every year,” he said.A few days after every cleanup, litter bugs begin replacing the garbage the Alexanders have picked up. But Rick, jokingly, calls it job security. “It's a little bit of contributing,” he said. “If everybody did a little, it wouldn't be as much work for the road department. It helps a little bit and it's good exercise.”On May 15, members of the Butler AM Rotary will clean up around the interchange of Routes 422, 68 and 308, the same area it has been cleaning for many years.Tim McCune, a county Common Pleas Court judge who leads the Rotary's cleanup, said members will clean up the area twice this year like they did before the pandemic.“COVID threw off the things we used to do,” McCune said. “Hopefully, we're getting back to our normal activities.”The club's second cleanup will take place in the fall, he said.“We normally get 10 to 12 people,” McCune said. “We're done in about an hour.”He said PennDOT provides gloves and garbage bags. Club volunteers fill the bags with litter and leave them for PennDOT workers to pick up.Just joining the clean up this year is the Rotary Club Cranberry Township-Sunrise.According to Jack Cohen, president nominee for Rotary District 7280 and president of the Butler County Tourism and Convention Bureau, the group adopted the stretch from Freedom and Powell corner to Rochester and Powell corner.About a dozen volunteers worked Saturday to pick up litter. The group plans to clean up the strip two or three times a year, Cohen said. The Pick Up Pennsylvania campaign runs through May 31.
On May 29, Butler AM Rotary club members and their children and grandchildren will take on the annual flower planting at the community garden at the corner of New Castle Road and Hansen Avenue through a sponsorship with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.“We get about 20 people usually, and they bring their kids and grandkids,” McCune said. “It's nice to have the kids there.”<i>Eagle managing editor Donna Sybert contributed to this report.</i>
