A Clean Sweep in Georgia

Civic pride is the key to keeping America beautiful

On television and from billboards, Iron Eyes Cody, the "Crying Indian," watches with a tear in his eye as unthinking Americans befoul the land of his ancestors. In newspaper ads, children are shown enthusiastically collecting bottles and cans from roadsides, and adults diligently dropping their trash in garbage cans labeled EVERY LITTER BIT HURTS. In front of freshly swept sidewalks, merchants pose proudly with their brooms. And at city hall, officials talk fervently of the need to make their town "a better place in which to live."

These scenes are part of a national nonprofit cleanup effort called Keep America Beautiful, Inc. Though their characters sometimes seem straight out of Norman Rockwell paintings, the surprising thing is that the campaign is working. So well, in fact, that dozens of American cities have sharply cut their Utter levels in the past few years. In Atlanta alone, where representatives of Keep America Beautiful as well as delegates from 14 foreign countries gathered last week for the 1980 conference of Clean World International, litter has been reduced by 52%. Two smaller Georgia cities have done even better. In Rome (pop. 30,000), litter is down 54% and in Macon (pop. 120,000) a spectacular 76%.*

Voluntary community participation has been the key to success. In Atlanta, schoolchildren collected a veritable mountain of discarded aluminum cans, worth about 23-c- per lb. at recycling centers, while youngsters and adult volunteers joined in planting trees and shrubs to turn empty lots into picturesque pocket parks. In Rome, volunteers cleaned up roadside ditches and trash-filled yards--and transformed a riverfront hangout for drunks and derelicts into a park that now attracts joggers and cyclists. Macon undertook a similar program, spending several million dollars to upgrade its sanitation department and establish a recycling center.

Yet sorties by young and old into the streets with brooms and garbage bags are only part of Keep America Beautiful. "A one-day cleanup doesn't accomplish anything," explained Sidney H. Estes, assistant superintendent for instruction for the Atlanta public schools and chairman of the Atlanta Clean City Commission. "Unless you educate people and change their Uttering behavior, you be back up to your knees in junk a day later."

To cure the citizenry of its littering bug, Georgia's clean communities have undertaken extensive public education programs in the schools and at civic forums. They have also been getting tougher by enforcing strict new antilitter laws. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), for example, has installed closed-circuit TV systems at each station of the city's new, spotlessly clean subway system, and has security officials constantly monitoring the screens. If anyone drops trash under the gaze of this Big Brotherly eye, he is likely to be shocked into compance with the Utter laws by a voice from a loudspeaker telling him to pick up his debris. In Rome, when owners of Utter-laden lots ignore a city citation ordering them to clean up their property, the municipality will hire a contractor to do the job and bill the owner. If the owner refuses to pay, the city does not hesitate to put a lien on his property. "We're not eager to do this," said Rome City Manager James A. Crace. "But we're not about to let a few people spoil it for all the others who want a clean community."

Nor are plain citizens any more tolerant. Public attitudes make it apparent that with cleanliness there grows strong community pride. And a contagious pride, at that. The spirit that has made Rome and Macon aU but spotless has spread to some 60 other U.S. cities and counties as well, including Charlotte, N.C., where the Utter level has dropped 71%; Chattanooga, Tenn., 57%; Portsmouth, Va., 70%; San Bernardino, Calif., 76%; Sioux Falls, S. Dak., 84%; and Indianapolis, 87%. That surely is a contagion that should be welcome everywhere.

* The measurements are made by comparing pictures taken of selected areas at random intervals.

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