Akron residents are being asked to volunteer to clean up their city throughout the month of April as part of Clean Up Akron Month.
Last year, the cleanup initiative removed more than 71 tons of trash across the city. But Keep Akron Beautiful CEO Jacqui Ricchiuti said more volunteers are needed to help clean up a city that is dirtier than it’s ever been.
"If you drive around the city, it looks dirty, and I think even more and more since the pandemic, it just looks dirtier and dirtier,” she said. “It's really sad that the amount of trash just keeps growing and growing and it just looks like we can't keep up with it."
Volunteers can sign up online to host their own cleanup efforts or participate in cleanups in their own neighborhoods.
“[Volunteers] can do their own self-directed cleanups in any city location, so any area of public property in the city,” Ricchiuti said. “So, their favorite park that their kids like to play at their street, maybe dirty and they want the supplies to clean it up.”
Keep Akron Beautiful will also lead two community cleanups later this month with a cleanup at Akron’s Patterson Park Sports Complex in Ward 2 on April 22 and at Summit Lake beach on April 29.
This is the second year Keep Akron Beautiful is hosting a cleanup in the ward through collaboration with Ward 2 Councilman Phil Lombardo.
“The benefits of this obviously is the whole community is invested in the environment and where they live,” Lombardo said.
Many members of Akron City Council view litter control as a top priority, Lombardo said, the majority of which is made up of old tires left on the sides of streets or on vacant lots.
“As long as it is not around them and they could get rid of it, then they think that they're done with the problem,” Lombardo said. “Well, it just creates two more problems for the rest of us.”
Volunteers removed more than 10,000 pounds of trash and 144 tires from the ward last year, Lombardo said, and the councilman has already identified several “hotspots” for the April 22 cleanup.
Keep Akron Beautiful employs two full-time litter cleanup coordinators who, before the pandemic, would lead from five to 10 volunteers and community service workers on cleanups each day. Now, Ricchiuti said, they’re lucky to have five volunteers in a week.
“So, the labor force has gone down, but the amount and the tonnage of trash that we're cleaning up is still rising, and that includes the court ordered community service trash as well as volunteer trash,” she said.
Although the number of volunteers has dwindled, trash only continues to accumulate, she said.
“In 2018, we had 4,759 volunteers that cleaned up 16.89 tons of litter. Last year we had 5,788 volunteers, but they cleaned up 71.03 tons of litter,” Ricchiuti said. “With that labor force being way less, we're still picking up about the same amount of trash and then the volunteers just has them out there picking up has just skyrocketed.”
Ricchiuti said she hopes to see a large number of volunteers, and that the impact Clean Up Akron Month has on the city rivals that of previous years.
“This is an everyone problem and we want everyone to take pride in ownership in the community and where they live, where they work, where they play, where their businesses, where they come for community events,” Ricchiuti said. “This is our Akron.”
