MYTH: “The city pays someone to clean up, we shouldn’t have to do that.”
TRUTH: The city DOES pay someone to clean up, but the hours required to maintain a clean city – especially one with 46 parks and 75 miles of trails – exceed what the city is able to afford.
- Cities rely on the assistance of volunteers to keep our cities clean, beautiful and safe.
MYTH: “Picking up trash is a waste of time; it just gets dirty again.”
TRUTH: Litter cleanup and education DO make a huge difference!
- Communities that are already clean are 3 times more likely to remain clean.
- Studies conducted by Keep America Beautiful demonstrated a 61% reduction in roadside litter over 40 years, with a decrease in percentage of persons littering from more than 50% to 15%.
- From 2007 to 2011, city crew and volunteers removed 12,000 tons of trash from just a 1.1 miles section of the Ogden River (Washington to Gibson St). Last year, we only removed half a dozen bags from that same section!
- Each time the Pliking Club returns to a trail, we encounter less litter than on our previous cleanup event.
MYTH: “Picking up other people’s trash is embarrassing.”
TRUTH: Ok, we can’t lie – picking up trash IS embarrassing, at first. However, most onlookers will applaud your efforts and even start picking up trash with you.
- Reality – who should be embarrassed, the person picking up the trash, or the person who dropped it there?
Creating a cleaner Ogden, cleaner Utah, and cleaner planet!
PLIKING 