Cleanup day set for Fort Smith, Van Buren

The annual Great American Cleanup, slated for Saturday (April 21), is making the rounds to Van Buren for the fourth time since the Keep Van Buren Beautiful (KVBB) movement began. But this time, the city has company.

A group of Fort Smith community volunteers will participate in the event, which has brought in around 3.8 million volunteers nationwide since its inception. In 2011, the state hosted 211 Great American Cleanup events, but Fort Smith was not in that number.

Fort Smith volunteer Paula Linder hopes to change that moving forward. She is working with KVBB Commissioner John Pope in the planning and promotion of the joint cleanup effort that will take place in Fort Smith and Van Buren simultaneously.

Linder said KVBB has provided “bags, gloves, and some T-Shirts, along with some banners that we can put up.”

“We’re hoping it’s going to be great. We have a list of groups that have tentatively said yes. I’ll be doing some follow-up today for an estimate of numbers. We’re not sure how many we’re going to have, but we’re hoping for 200 people,” Linder said.

Pope told The City Wire on Monday (April 9) that “normally we have about 100 cars show up with one or two people in them,” and that the “Coleman Junior High football team will contribute heavily to the operation.”

Pope noted there would be volunteers at the Van Buren City Park and the Van Buren School District Yard in Industrial Park, the latter of which will serve as the location for the day’s main effort: electronic waste disposal.

“The e-waste event is really our big event in the spring time. We’re usually able to fill up a semi-trailer load of e-waste in about three hours,” Pope said.

From there, the e-waste materials are taken to “a prison in Texarkana, Ark.,” Pope said, by the Clarksville-based company Greensource.

Pope explained: “From there, Unicor recycles what can be. They’ll refurbish and sell down there, while everything else is melted down.”

Additionally, Van Buren-based USA Truck has partnered with KVBB to ensure that “homebound people, who are disabled or elderly, will have someone to come pick up their e-waste,” Pope said.

KVBB’s e-waste program will kick off at 9 a.m., while the group meeting at the City Park is encouraged to be there by 10 a.m.'

'MOUNTAIN OF TRASH'
While KVBB will focus on the e-waste aspects of the Great American Cleanup, “along with some trash pickup,” the Fort Smith volunteers will focus solely on trash collection.

Since Fort Smith is equipped to handle electronic waste year-round as opposed to Van Buren, which collects once annually, the Fort Smithians’ goal is to “build a mountain of trash bags in the Southside High School Parking Lot before disposing of them,” Linder said.

“I don’t know how big our mountain is going to be, but we’re wanting the visual to show the community what an awful and sad problem this is,” Linder said.

Linder hopes the people, who show up to participate at 8 a.m. in the Southside High School parking lot will “claim their space and tell people not to mess it up” moving forward. She’s hoping the event will serve as a catalyst to concerned citizens, who wish to “keep Fort Smith looking beautiful year-round.”

Linder also wants the event to be the start of a movement to help organize an ongoing effort “for beautifying Fort Smith.”

She wants to “hopefully do annual pickup efforts, and maybe one during the fall (which KVBB currently does),” she said.

Linder continued: “I guess my hope is that people will realize if the government doesn’t have money to do things like this, then volunteers will have to help. It’s our city and we need to take responsibility for it. We need volunteers, who care about the city.”

On April 14, there will be a kickoff event, during which street sweepers will clean the Midland Bridge starting at 10 a.m.