The Greening of Akron, Ohio

KEEP AKRON BEAUTIFUL

850 East Market StreetAkron, Ohio44305-2424

330.375.2116Fax: 330.375.2118

www.keepakronbeautiful.org

Mission Statement of Keep Akron Beautiful:

Keep Akron Beautiful develops and implements public education and community improvement programs on litter prevention, recycling, waste management, and beautification to encourage citizens to take pride in Akron by participating in these activities.

The Greening of Akron, Ohio

Keep Akron Beautiful partnered with the City of Akron to provide red, white and blue Aster seed packets to residents in the spring 2007 edition of the City Magazine, issued by The City of Akron’s Communications Department. Residents photographed their gardens and to share them through the City’s publications!

Keep Akron Beautiful conducted their seventh Litter Index, a requirement of membership in the Keep America Beautiful, Inc. network of over 565 affiliates on June 29, 2007. On a scale of 0 - 4, a drive-by tour of all ten wards rated Akron an overall 1.6, between none to slightly littered, citywide!The most littered land use was residential neighborhoods with the least littered properties used for educational or farming purposes. City Wards 7, 8 and 9 were in the “no litter” category overall!

Keep Akron Beautiful, the one investment guaranteed to grow, raised over $124,000 from the private sector to help plan, plant and maintain 38 Flowerscape sites in downtown Akron, at Alexander Park and Derby Downs. There is one new Flowerscape in 2007 at the entrance to the future Cascade Mill Park. The 2007 season wholesale flower bill was $20,154 for 37,740 plants! The Flowerscape Director supervised over 80 volunteer groups gardening Adopt-A-Sites on public land located in all ten wards of the city. There were 3 new Adopt-A-Sites during the 2007 growing season! Volunteers purchased and planted 22,110 annuals, paying $5,602 wholesale! Our appreciation to the residents of over 20 Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority developments for pitching in and gardening around their signs.

The full-time Education Specialist took her syllabus of classroom environmental presentations into public, private and charter schools, grades kindergarten through 12 during the 2006-07 school year. She presented 275 40-minute modules on a wide range of environmental topics reaching 7,840 students. During the spring and summer months she presented 10 presentations to a camp, a Head Start program and a Brownie troop reaching another 210 people. Her new 2007-08 curriculum Enviro-Lessons to Energize Your Classroom” has 10 presentations to choose from: groundwater, land filling, non-point source pollution, litter prevention, reducing and reusing solid waste, alternatives to household hazardous waste, recyclingand graffiti prevention. For the spring 2008 semester we the agency will offer a module about energy efficiency!

Keep Akron Beautiful has managed a litter and illegal dumping collection program for 26 years. Three supervisors under the direction of a full-time Litter Collection Coordinator canvass the city’s expressways, roadsides and parks daily, year-round. In 2007, January 1 through November 16, 2007, our employees supervised 1,417 community service-sentenced crewmembers as they picked up over 64.53 tons of litter/dumping off of public property. They source-separated for recycling 725 bags of recyclable commodities and recycled 234scrap tires.

The 26th Annual Clean Up Akron Week/Great American Cleanup™, April 21-28, 2007, mobilized 1,627 volunteers from 111 volunteer groups to cleanup 94 public sites of litter and illegal dumping! Twenty-four schools had 3,044 students cleaning their campuses. A total of 10.8 tons of trash and 543 scrap tires were removed from public property. The Akron Zoo provided free admission on Super Saturday, April 28th, for about 750 cleanup volunteers who came for a free lunch and an awards ceremony, planned by our Beautification Board members.

“Pick It Up!” is the theme for Keep Akron Beautiful’s litter-free events. In 2007 there KAB participated in three litter-free events held at Canal Park Stadium as part of the Akron Aero’s Education Days. Keep Akron Beautiful contributed Lucky Ladybug litter prevention lesson plans to the Baseball IS Education, the Roadway Express sponsored curriculum, that went out to 275 schools/classrooms in northeast Ohio.At these events various forms of promotion are used to remind fans to not litter, including passing trash bags through the seats to dispose of what usually ends up under the seat! The behavior modification message about responsibly handling solid waste reached 18,000 young fans.

On Arbor Day, April 27th, 2007, three Akron elementary schools celebrated with tree planting ceremonies. The three classes that were judged 1^st through 3^rd place in the annual slogan contest received donated nursery trees as their prizes. “Akron is your canvas, paint it with trees” was the first place slogan written by a fourth grade class at Miller South School. Also, 3,500 Virginia Pine seedlings were distributed to each fourth grader in town, thanks to a grant from the FirstEnergy Foundation. The Education Specialist visited 57 fourth grade classrooms to present her Arbor Day PowerPoint show and Jeopardy Game to 2,770 elementary students.

Keep Akron Beautiful mailed out 2,699 Beautification Watch Awards in September, 2007 to residences, businesses and institutions that did an outstanding job of private property beautification and litter control. Congratulations, people DO notice! Neighborhoods were canvassed by 33 Beautification Board volunteers and agency staff during the month of July, and will do so again in July 2008.

Flowerscape crew members had to wait until late in October 2007 to pull out the spent plant material in the public gardens due to the record breaking warm temperatures. When they did they used kraft bags that were special ordered to hold the material so it could be transported to the Akron Compost Facility to be used I making earth Pro for the 2008 growing season! With a little extra effort Keep Akron Beautiful was able to keep 12.1 tons of yard waste out of the landfill!