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Following are some activities that Keep Hall Beautiful, Inc. offers: Education A highly successful educational program designed to instill pride in the students’ school environment. The program focuses on asking students to make a commitment to help control litter and teaches the value of recycling in their schools. A certificate of achievement was presented to the winners at the 2001-02 annual Awards Banquet.
We appreciate all of the effort put forth in coordinating the Environmental Achievement Awards in the schools each year. We encourage all schools both public and private to participate.
“Waste In Place” workshops are held to show area teachers how to incorporate waste reduction, recycling and litter prevention messages into any curriculum they teach. “Crimes Against the Environment” classes are offered each year to local law enforcement and others who have in interest in environmental crimes such as the fire department, forest service and local judges, prosecutors, building inspectors and code enforcement officers. Classes are offered to local tire dealers about the proper disposal of old tires and new laws or regulations that may come into effect each year. These classes also offer the tire dealers a networking opportunity with the tired recyclers in our area. Volunteers suit up as Woodsy Owl or Smokey Bear to carry litter prevention and recycling messages to school students. In 2002, Keep Hall Beautiful has done12 classroom presentations, 2 youth group presentations and 166 community outreach presentations, reaching a total of 9.055 students and 241,694 adults. Community Cleanups Each year, Keep Hall Beautiful, coordinates volunteers for community cleanups. We help with development of flyers, posters and psa’s and media promotion for the events and the recruitment of volunteers. We provide trash bags and a way to dispose of the litter once it has been picked up. We also coordinate with Hall County each year in its furniture and appliance pickup (formerly known as Operation Clean Sweep). We provide personnel to help the elderly get their heavy debris up to the right of way so that the county can pick it up and properly dispose of it. Each spring, Keep America Beautiful sponsors a nation wide imitative known as the “Great American Cleanup”. Keep Hall Beautiful participates annually and holds an event each weekend from the end of March through May. Events can be community cleanups, litter pickups, graffiti removal, cleaning illegal dumpsites, painting a house or playground equipment or collecting old clothes for recycling. In 2002, Keep Hall Beautiful participated in 3 community cleanups. You can help sponsor a “Great American Cleanup” event by donating goods or services, tools, equipment, t-shirts for volunteers, sponsor a cookout or picnic after an event, provide volunteers from your company or by making a cash donation. Event sponsors are recognized in all media promotions, on site with banners or posters and at our annual Environmental Achievement Awards banquet held each spring. If you would like to sponsor an event, or volunteer, please contact the Keep Hall Beautiful office at 770-531-1102 or marshaf@bellsouth.net. Volunteers Our goals would be impossible to accomplish with out the concerned citizens in our community who give of their time and talents to help preserve our environment. Our volunteers are recognized each year at our annual Environmental Achievement Awards banquet. In 2002, 793 volunteers devoted 3,172 man hours to making our community a cleaner, safer and more beautiful place in which to live, work and play. Unkempt Properties Twenty volunteers spent a Saturday morning removing 33 tons of garbage, fixtures, building materials and other trash from this yard. The county does not have a law that lets it use public equipment or labor to clean garbage strewn on private property. As a result, Keep Hall Beautiful works with the code enforcement arm of the county’s magistrate court to help resolve problems of this nature. Junk Cars Keep Hall Beautiful in conjunction with the National Kidney Foundation is sponsoring a Kidney Car Program to help rid Gainesville/Hall County of junk cars in the area. People who wish to donate their junk cars get a tax deduction and the Kidney Foundation gets the money for research. Keep Hall Beautiful acts as a contact for this area by fielding phone calls and referring donation information to the Kidney Foundation. Promotes Recycling for Mule Camp Springs On October 10-12, 1997, Keep Hall Beautiful joined with Hall County Resource Recovery to “for the first time ever” promotes recycling for the annual Mule Camp Springs event. Pepsi Cola donated “Think Recycle” banners to help jog everyone’s memory to participate in recycling. Rick Foote from Hall County Resource Recovery provided the recycle containers. Keep Hall Beautiful provided 35 volunteers that completed 217 man-hours staffing the Keep Hall Beautiful display, and going from station to station throughout the festival area making sure that recyclables were disposed of properly. Keep Hall Beautiful was able to provide educational information to the public through the use of shared displays from Keep Hall Beautiful, US Forest Service and the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. Printed materials were distributed. Various questions on recycling litter control and the purchase of recycled goods were addressed. Joy the Clown, who was appearing at the festival; lent a hand in the promotion of recycling by demonstrating how to use recycles containers. Joy was quoted as saying, “I even recycle blood.” He was on his way to the bloodmobile to donate as he walked away. The event was very successful and the Gainesville Jaycee’s have asked that we participate annually in Mule Camp Springs. As a result of our efforts with Mule Camp, the Rainbow Festival, held in the spring, has also asked Keep Hall Beautiful to participate in their festival as well. These have become annual events for Keep Hall Beautiful and rowing events, Friends of the Parks Butterfly Release and the mountain bike races have been added to the list of events promoting recycling. Telephone Directory Recycling Program Recycling our phone books will save energy, trees, air, water, and can keep 100,000 phone books out of our landfill. Recycled phone books are used to make insulation, mulch for landscaping and animal bedding. School collection contests were conducted. Award certificates and ice cream parties went to winning classrooms, as well as cash awards to the 3 schools that collected the most weight per student. Last year’s school program netted 25.21 tons with a total collection for the year of 25 tons. This project is temporarily put on hold due to lack of funding. Schools use this project toward attaining the Keep Hall Beautiful Environmental Achievement Award given at the annual banquet. Christmas Tree Recycling. A “One For the Chipper” Christmas Tree Recycling program has been held for the past nine years. The 2002 season culminated with the recycling of over 3,000 Christmas trees at Hall County compactor sites. Recycling the Christmas trees has saved the public approximately $1,150 in landfill tipping fees and by providing free mulch. It has also saved approximately 1,000 cubic yards of landfill space. Georgia Clean and Beautiful sponsored this program with business sponsors such as Home Depot, Georgia Power, 11 Alive, Georgia Pacific, and Davie Tree Service. The public has gained an understanding through this program that items once thought of as just waste can be of beneficial use. The objective of this project is to educate the public and solid waste management, recycling trees and saving landfill space. Seedlings were provided to the contributor of each tree recycled. Adopt-A-Stream Program Mud, trash and eroded stream banks are targets for members with the Gainesville-Hall County Adopt-A-Stream program. Volunteers restored a segment of Flat Creek’s banks that would control erosion, restore plant life and hopefully bring back some wildlife scared away by surrounding development. Volunteers do stream monitoring and quarterly stream cleanups to ensure water quality standards meet EPD criteria. Restoration projects are done as needed to help deter stream sedimentation problems. Segments of Flat Creek, Limestone and Balus Creek have been adopted. Beautification Program In partnership with the City of Oakwood, the South Hall Kiwanis Club, the South Hall Rotary Club, Gainesville College, Jackson EMC and local businesses in the area, Keep Hall Beautiful started and has maintained the plantings in the medians on Mundy Mill Road and the at the off ramps of I985. Our statistics show, that since the beatification project started, the amount of litter picked up has dramatically dropped. Litter Control Programs In addition to Keep Hall Beautiful’s paid litter crew, volunteers lend assistance to preserve and enhance the quality of the environment. Recruits clean along highways, streets, neighborhoods, parks and other private properties. Georgia DOT frequently furnishes the trash bags and vests and the Gainesville and Hall County Public Works Departments’ help to dispose of debris once it has been collected. Environmental Court Keep Hall Beautiful aids and assists the Hall County Magistrate Court in its function as a tribunal for hearing our local county ordinances. It also helps Gainesville-Hall Enforcement, the prosecuting agency, in its enforcement of the same regulations. Many of these ordinances regulate the environmental quality of our neighborhoods, our soil, water and other aspects affecting daily quality of life in Hall County. This assistance provided by Keep Hall Beautiful includes sharing information concerning potential violations to the Enforcement office, monitoring clean up efforts by offenders, cleaning up specific sites where feasible and acting as a source of information for the Magistrate Court and the Prosecutor of these ordinances. Illegal Dump Sites A clean community makes a positive impression. Unsightly illegal dumping sites have the opposite effect. With the help of 24 volunteers working more than 100 hours we cleaned five of these eyesores this year. We collected 390 bags of garbage and several tons of miscellaneous large items and old tires. Community Service Workers A program in cooperation with the State Department of Probation that utilizes judicially assigned offenders for public property cleanup and community service as an alternative to fines or jail sentences. 824 hours worked resulting in a $4,532 cost
reduction to taxpayers. Litter along roadways removed and illegal
dumping sites cleaned. |
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