New Keep Pike County Beautiful executive director Kayla Roberts hopes people will take the theme to this year’s Great American Cleanup to heart — “Plant Pride, Not Litter.”
The cleanup begins Saturday and runs throughout May.
Cleanup registration will be in the Sears parking lot at Edgewood Mall in McComb from 8 a.m. until noon Saturday Participants will receive trash bags. Registration in Magnolia at the Community Center is at the same time.
Keep Pike County Beautiful is celebrating its 10th year of affiliation with the Keep America Beautiful national campaign.
“We’re working on getting all the supplies together,” said Roberts, who took over the position in February. “I hope we’ll have a good turnout and an even better turnout next year.”
According to a report earlier this year from Washington, D.C., anti-litter consultant Steve Spacek, the Pike County area is among the trashiest in the country. He is the author of the “American State Litter Scorecard,” which is published every three years.
Spacek’s 2011 litter index had Mississippi tied for third in the nation with Nevada. Spacek traveled through Pike County over the Christmas Holidays and wrote about the trash and litter clogging the local roadways.
Based on that litter index, Keep Pike County Beautiful knows where to begin cleaning the county’s heaviest concentration of litter.
The most littered area in the county is in Fernwood from the Highway 51 stoplight to the railroad tracks.
Five of the top 13 most littered areas in the county are located in District 3, while three areas each are found in districts 4 and 5.
The other most littered areas in the county are:
• District 2 — Pounds Road to LeBlanc Road.
• District 3 — West Topisaw Road to Ted Thompson Road, Conerly Drive to Jewel Drive, River Ridge Road, Highway 24 to the four-way stop at Pike 93 and Gibson Road.
• District 4 — Veterans Boulevard to Enterprise Road, Old Springs Road to Carruth Road and Old Brookhaven Road to County Line Road.
• District 5 — Kelly Church Road to Magnolia-Progress Road, St. Mary Drive to Chatawa Springs and Gladhurst Road to Rawls Road.
“The supervisors are working really hard to keep their districts clean, but it’s more of a community effort,” Roberts said. “We’re trying to educate people and hope they’ll become aware of the litter in our county.”
