Keep America Beautiful--Recycling for Everyone

Listen up teachers, scout leaders, garden clubs, church groups, sportsmen's groups and others. Here's an idea for getting involved in an environmental activity.

April and May are "Keep America Beautiful" (KAB) months, a national effort by an organization of the same name to get people to get out and "clean up, restore and beautify our nation's communities." Last year, the organization says, more than a million people volunteered and picked up an estimated "28 million pounds of litter and recyclables from roadsides, vacant lots, medians, beaches, riversides, parks and hundreds of other places in 100 communities." This year KAB hopes for twice as many volunteers, which could mean double the pounds collected. Your group could get involved as described below.

To make it easy for people to get involved, First Brands Corporation, the maker of GLAD Wrap and Bags, is joining the project. GLAD is putting four million boxes of GLAD Handle-Tie Bags on store shelves across the country with an invitation on them to "Keep America Beautiful." Each box has an educational packet inside that describes how to organize neighborhood litter cleanups. GLAD will also donate 50 cents per bag of litter collected to KAB--up to $50,000. All a group of litter cleaner-uppers has to do is call 1-800-292-5153 to report their "litter bag count" to activate a donation.

Beautifying America involves more than just picking up litter once a year, of course. It involves year-round reuse and recycling, a project that is perfect for businesses. Many businesses, in fact, do reuse and recycle materials. Anheuser-Busch says that it recycles 17 billion aluminum cans yearly--more cans than it produces--and enough to save the energy it would take to power Boston for a year.

Ford Motor Company is another big recycler. Ford says that post-consumer plastic soda bottles are used to make brackets for car grilles, crumb rubber is used to make brake shoes, and polypropylene from used battery casings is used to make fender splash shields. Ford says that more than a million of its cars a year are manufactured with parts containing recycled materials--50 million 2-liter pop bottles, 27 million pounds of post-consumer plastics from bottle caps to compute housings, and 5 million pounds of old battery casings. Soon fan parts for Windstar minivans will be made from post-consumer nylon carpeting, an estimated 1,400 homes' worth of carpet annually.

J & J Industries, Inc., a carpet company once known as one of the 10 largest contributors of waste at its regional landfill in Dalton, Ga., has reduced waste produced at its plant by 81 percent. Textile scraps, yarn, cardboard yarn tubes and boxes, and wrapping material are baled and recycled. Even lint is recycled by selling it to a buyer rather than paying $800 a month to dispose of it at the landfill.