After weeks of cool, wet weather, Saturday April 25 dawned warm and bright.  South Plainfield’s volunteer community came out in force to wage war against trash.  Volunteer Litter Pickup Day offered a preview of summer as temperatures climbed into the 80’s and people spread out through the Borough to gather up the winter’s accumulation of litter and junk.

Twenty-four groups registered for Clean-up Week, including Girl Scout Troop 109, 745, 117 and 833; Boy Scout Troops 124 and 309, Cub Scout Packs 22, 324 and 207; the Cedarcroft Bible Chapel,  the  Wesley Church, the 4H EcoManiacs, NJ Watershed Ambassadors, South Plainfield Environmental Commission, South Plainfield Business Association, Harris Steel, South Plainfield Funeral Home, Stillman Photography Services, the Democratic and the Republican Organizations, Sacred Heart School, SP Middle School and SP High  School Student Councils, Keystone Community Residence, and the Middlesex County Work Assistance crew.  Several families preregistered, many of them joined by their neighbors, and a record number of walk-ins brought the turnout to well over 200 people.

 Many of the volunteers, after a morning bagging trash and fighting off ticks, came back with their cleanup reports to the Senior Center on Maple Avenue.  The Pickup Picnic was unusually well attended.    Mayor Butrico and Councilmember Buteas pitched in to help serve pizza, sandwiches and soda to the hungry workers.  Frank Rainear of the SP Funeral Home donated the pizza from Bruno’s Pizza Factory this year, and Charlie and Debbie Kurland of Home Town Heros provided two large plates of sandwiches.  McCrisken’s Funeral Home sponsored the Pizza Pickup Picnic for the Keystone Community Residence, which did their cleanup later in the week. 

A highlight of the Picnic was an exhibit set up by the NJ Watershed Ambassadors that showed how water moves through a watershed.  Residents could see how litter would end up in our streams and lakes.   Five groups entered the Oddest Piece of Litter Contest.  There was a free raffle for ornamental shrubs donated by the Environmental Commission. Volunteers also received Clean Communities backpack made with recycled soda bottles.

 The piles of orange bags around town bore witness to the dedication of the volunteers as well as to the thoughtlessness of fellow citizens who left the litter for others to clean up.   Pinto Brothers and the Borough’s Recycling Program groundskeepers shared the job of collecting and disposing of the trash.   By the end of the week, cleanups had been done at forty-two locations, including parks, roadsides, streams and vacant lots.  Volunteers cleaned 6.5 miles of road and 59 acres of public land.   As of this writing, we are still missing reports from about ten groups, but so far we know that there were at least 192 orange bags of litter weighing over 3 tons, plus about another .75 ton unbagged junk and .25 ton of bottles and cans that were clean enough to be recycled. 

Several groups commented that they had found less litter than when they worked at the same locations last year.  The Clean Communities Advisory Board is hoping that this is a trend that will continue.