Keep Marietta Beautiful
Keep Marietta Beautiful's mission to generate an environmental pride and a sense of ownership within the Marietta community. Because you are reading this, I am sure you all believe in that mission as well. We truly believe that the appearance of a city affects its residents and whether businesses and new residents decide to locate here. Where there is litter and graffiti, people will not come. That includes tourists. And where there's litter and graffiti, studies - and I'm sure your own eyes - show us that crime and litter and graffiti goes hand-in-hand.
So we believe our work is integrated with the missions of law enforcement and economic development. When residents feel like they are part of a community, they take pride in what's around them and how things look. They won't throw trash out the window in their own neighborhoods when they feel that sense of ownership. We take our job seriously to do everything we can to make this a safe and economically viable community.
As your local affiliate for Keep America Beautiful, we work to implement their 3 core goals: Litter Prevention, Beautification and Waste Reduction. Over the past year, here is how we have done that:
- More than 1,000 citizens volunteered more than three thousand-one hundred hours for activities like Love the Loop, neighborhood cleanups, a Chattahoochee River cleanup, Adopt-A-Mile, Teacher Supply Storehouse, tree plantings, electronics recycling and other activities to make your city a better place to live.
- With our coordination, residents recycled almost 7,000 tons of paper, yard clippings, glass and plastic.
- At 24 programs throughout the year, we educated more than 7,000 children and 1,300 adults on recycling, water conservation, trees, environmental preservation and the effects of littering.
- Just last year we began inkjet cartridge recycling and electronics recycling programs. Both initiatives have been tremendously successful. Our first electronics recycling day last summer drew more than 300 families and businesses who recycled 2-and-a-half tractor trailers worth of computers and other electronics, weighing more than 60,000 pounds! This is 3 tons of material that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill. I am proud to announce that we have just received a grant from the Keep Georgia Beautiful Foundation that will allow us to hold another electronics recycling event this year.
- In addition to all this, we also conducted 8 litter-free events, compiled the city's litter index, looked after the city cemetery, conducted a water festival, planted trees at city schools on arbor day, coordinated the Great American Cleanup and worked with the Marietta Police Department to clean up graffiti in the city.
That's quite a number of accomplishments. But we couldn't have done it alone. We are blessed to be supported by a wonderful city, including the mayor and city council, the parks and recreation staff, code enforcement, law enforcement, public works and sanitation. Because you, the city, have had the foresight to invest in us, I want you to know that we take your investment seriously and turn that into an even bigger investment in the city. For every dollar the citizens invest in Keep Marietta Beautiful, the return on investment is 3 dollars and 37 cents.
In addition to our wonderful volunteers and community and business partners, Keep Marietta Beautiful is led by a volunteer board. This is a group of dedicated city residents and business partners who truly care about their community. They work very quietly behind the scenes to organize our many projects. This board includes:
- Johnny Banks
- Martha Crawford
- Jewel Cribb
- Pat Dooley
- Judy Garrett
- Dorothy Ann Garrett
- Candice Groves
- Karen Hillenbrand, Chair
- Betty Lou Hunter
- Bonnie Lantz
- Lloyd Nawrocki
- Michael Petelle
- Lynn Robertson
- Courtenay Vanderbilt
- Mary West
- Ann Wolf
We also are supported through close ties with other local affiliates in Smyrna, Georgia and Cobb County, Georgia, as well as our statewide organization, Keep Georgia Beautiful. We are affiliated with Keep America Beautiful on a national level.
How do I join Keep Marietta Beautiful?
Recycling information