Keep Carroll Beautiful was chosen as one of 10 nationwide affiliates in the Keep America Beautiful’s second annual April 6 National Day of Action, as part of the Great American Cleanup. Keep Carroll Beautiful received a $1,000 grant from the national organization to help stage the event and will be showcased in national publicity.
The household hazardous waste and electronics waste collections will be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Southwire corporate parking lot on Dixie Street in Carrollton.
“Representatives of Keep America Beautiful will be here and the national news media have been invited,” said Jacqueline Dost, executive director of Keep Carroll Beautiful. “They will be recognizing our program for its innovative efforts and hard work and our efforts in the social media. This will be a great opportunity for Carroll County to show who we are and what we’re doing.”
Dost said several businesses have made donations to make the April 6 event successful. They include a grant of $8,200 from the Community Foundation of West Georgia, $2,500 from Southwire, $2,000 from the West Georgia Regional Local Emergency Planning Committee and several other smaller donations.
Dost made a request to the Carroll County Board of Commissioners Thursday for a $3,000 donation.
She said people wanting to bring household hazardous waste to the event should first pre-register on the Keep Carroll Beautiful website.
“We need to know how much we’ll be getting and if somebody’s planning to bring something extremely hazardous, such as a load of mercury,” she said.
Clean Harbors Environmental Services of Tucker will be the company handling the collection and disposal of the hazardous household waste. Dost said these hazardous household wastes include such things as solvents, solvent based paints, stains, caustic and “a lot of things we have in our sheds, garages and basements.”
“These are things we’re not going to use anymore, but we don’t know what to do with them,” she said. “Putting them down the drain is not the right thing to do.”
She said the campaign is also reaching out to the farming community to urge it to recycle insecticides and pesticides.
“The USDA used to have a program like this, but they haven’t done it for years,” she said. “I understand there’s a small pilot recycling program going on in seven counties around the state, but unfortunately, Carroll is not one of them.”
Keep Carroll Beautiful used a similar pre-registration last September when it held its first paint recycling event, which collected 2,600 gallons of used in four hours from 151 cars visiting the event.
“The paint was then disposed of in a sound way by a paint recycler from Atlanta,” Dost said. “They turned it into paint that was used on other projects.”
Dost said Keep Carroll Beautiful holds the electronic recycling events twice a year and over the past six years has kept a lot of hazardous materials out of the landfill.
“We’ve collected almost 800,000 pounds of electronics,” she said. “While electronic material accounts for only about 2 percent of the volume that goes into landfills, it represents about 70 percent of the toxins going into landfills. These are toxins that could be affecting our groundwater and soil and we want to make sure we keep them out.”
Keep Carroll Beautiful is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which relies on contributions from companies and individuals for operating expenses. It is governed by a board of directors, which includes local community volunteers and city and county employees. The group meets at noon on the first Tuesday of each month at the organization’s office, 103 Professional Plaza, Carrollton. The phone number is 678-321-4816.
Other Keep Carroll Beautiful programs include:
• Bring One for the Chipper, an annual Christmas tree recycling event;
• Curbside recycling, working with the cities of Carrollton and Villa Rica, where homeowners can place their aluminum, cardboard, tin cans, paper and plastic in special blue containers or recycling bins and place them on the curb with regular trash;
• and Carroll County convenience centers, which are owned and operated by the Carroll County Board of Commissioners for the convenience of county residents. Keep Carroll Beautiful maintains a list of convenience centers, which are listed at www.keepcarrollbeautiful.org/recycling/convenience-centers.
Keep America Beautiful is a U.S. based nonprofit organization founded in 1953. It is the largest community improvement organization in the United States, with approximately 589 affiliate organizations and more than 1,000 community organizations that participate in its programs.
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