Call for All Volunteers: KCCB Plans Fall Cleanup of Highway 321
Published Tuesday, October 11, 2022 at 8:04 AM
Volunteers from Keep Carter County Beautiful will be doing a fall cleanup this Saturday at 10am on Hwy 321.
“I don’t want visitors’ first impression of our county to be trash on Highway 321,” said Don Hlavaty, who helps coordinate the cleanup.
He described the road as one of the busiest routes in the county. “Many work trucks and commercial vehicles travel this route, as well as vehicles destined for landfills,” he said. “Unfortunately, with heavy traffic comes a lot of trash.”
And picking up litter is an ongoing challenge for volunteers.
Hlavaty recounts a recent conversation he had with a volunteer after he emailed him news of an upcoming cleanup. “She asked, ‘Didn’t she just clear that road three months ago?'” he said. “We told her we did, but people keep throwing trash on her road.”
In fact, Hlavaty personally walks two miles down one particular road every Sunday to pick up trash and debris. “I’ve been picking up 39 gallons of garbage bags every week for the past four years,” he said. “That’s 400 bags of garbage.”
If you are interested in keeping the area clean, please help out on Saturday. “We will meet at the Tweezy Trail parking lot in Lions Field on Hwy 321 in Elizabethton,” he said. “If we can get 18 volunteers together, we can clean up an entire three-mile stretch of road.”
