City to Come Clean With ScoutSweep

[March 27, 2008]  The Lincoln City Council heard Boy Scout representatives at Tuesday evening's meeting discuss a plan to sweep the downtown area of the city for trash.

Paul Lee, district executive for W.D. Boyce Council from Bloomington, explained that the Boyce Council involves 14 counties in Illinois. Every year they participate in a program called "A Good Turn for America," in which 13,000 Scouts and over 4,000 volunteers get out and participate in a community project. The last two years the project put out collection cans that supplied funds that built a house in Peoria and half the funds for a house built in Bloomington.

In this year's program the Scouts are joining the rest of society in the green kick, he said. The ScoutSweep campaign is a cleanup of streets and public places.

Washington-Monroe School Pack 105 Scoutmaster Chad Bennett was charged with energy as he explained the plan for the April 12 activity. There are 10 Scouts and about 40 volunteers in all who will meet at 9 a.m. at the school and canvass city blocks, picking up trash and recyclables, Bennett said. Three other packs in Lincoln may be joining them.

A number of local businesses have pledged to assist the Scouts with needs for the day. Mel-O-Cream, IGA, Alexander Lumber, Lincoln Land Communications and Domino's Pizza will provide collection supplies, drop-off points and food.

Their rain date is April 19.

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From W.D Boyce Council ScoutSweep page:

Trash facts

• One-third of all garbage discarded by Americans is packaging.

• In the U.S., yard trimmings and food scraps make up about one-fourth of our waste stream.

• Americans throw away about 10 percent of the food they buy at the supermarket. 

• An estimated 200 million gallons of used motor oil is improperly disposed of each year in the U.S. by being dumped on the ground, tossed in the trash (ending up in landfills) and poured down storm sewers and drains.

• Over 500 million oil filters need to be disposed of each year.

• In one year, 359 million magazines and 24 billion newspapers are published in the U.S.

• In the U.S., it is estimated that an additional 5 million tons of waste is generated during the holidays; 4 million tons of this is wrapping paper and shopping bags.

• The average American office worker goes through about 500 disposable cups every year.

• Debris on roadways nationwide causes 25,000 accidents each year and more than 80 fatalities.

Recycling facts

• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.

• Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can within six weeks.

• During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-ounce aluminum cans are made.

• An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now.

• There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can, can be recycled.

• We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.

• To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.

• If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year.

• If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.

• The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year.

• In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.

• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.

• Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic beverage bottles every hour.

• American throw away 25,000,000,000 styrofoam coffee cups every year.

• Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable.

• A modern glass bottle would take 4,000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.

(Source: ScoutSweep)

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