Keep Myrtle Beach Beautiful, an affiliate of the Keep America Beautiful initiative, is young, as it has only hosted two cleanups since becoming official in October of 2021.
“Each community has its own issues that you’re trying to address,” Diana Greene, executive director of Keep Myrtle Beach Beautiful, said. “It can be educational, it can be litter pickup, it can be cigarette butt programs. There’s a ton of things that you can do.”
The Keep America Beautiful program, according to Greene, encourages each of its affiliates to assess the needs of their individual areas. So, while litter is a nationwide problem, as discovered by the nationwide program, each city and state may have additional problems that affiliates are encouraged to address within their areas.
Because Keep Myrtle Beach Beautiful is so new, it has yet to tackle issues other than litter because its members are still assessing the needs of the City of Myrtle Beach. The program also does not yet have data on exactly which areas of our city are the most inundated with litter but Greene said that there has been a lot of litter seen along the beach.
“We’ll be doing things year-round,” Greene said. “We just finished our last cleanup this Monday where we went and actually cleaned up at the boardwalk area of the beach and that was great. We had 53 bags of trash that we collected and 55 volunteers came out.”
Greene said Keep Myrtle Beach Beautiful will introduce a program in the fall that will allow for individuals or businesses to adopt the block around them.
“It doesn’t have to be the biggest area but the area around you. You can really start thinking about what can you do to improve it from a standpoint of litter control and beautification. It would make a huge difference,” Greene said.
Greene says that volunteers will be needed year-round.
“We have a lot of community members that got involved at all ages. I’ve had people all the way from high school seniors, all the way up to people that are young retirees,” Greene said. “We have a lot of different ways you can volunteer. So you can come and do a pickup. If you’re a good photographer, we have photography opportunities. You could just come help us with some admin work that we might need. So there’s a lot of ways you can get involved. So that makes it kind of easy for people with various skill sets to actually come and help out.”
Myrtle Beachers who are interested in helping to keep our city beautiful can click this link to sign up and find out more.
Comments