Houma residents touted for cleanup effort

Dear Editor:

After four months of tabulating data from all 50 states, the results are in – and they are outstanding!

Thanks to the efforts of Houma’s many volunteers and local activities during Keep America Beautiful’s Great American Cleanup(tm), your community is a cleaner – and safer – place to live.

Your volunteers were among more than 2.2 million volunteers across America, who logged more than 7.5 million hours of volunteer time.

The Great American Cleanup(tm), the nation’s largest annual community improvement program, is Keep America Beautiful in action. I’m especially proud to report some of our 2006 accomplishments:

• 37 million plastic bottles and more than 2.5 million scrap tires diverted from the waste stream

• 10,200 illegal dump sites cleaned, which is more than double the number of sites cleaned in 2005

• 168,000 miles of streets, roads and highways cleaned and beautified, approximately equal to seven times around the earth

• 3,900 miles of hiking, biking and nature trails cleaned, equivalent to a trail stretching from Key West, Fla., to Seattle

• 38.5 million pounds of aluminum and steel recycled, an 80 percent increase over 2005’s total

• 4.8 million pounds of electronics recycled, a 32 percent increase over 2005’s total

• 5.4 million plants, flowers and bulbs planted, a 29 percent increase over 2005’s total

Keep America Beautiful, a national nonprofit community improvement and education organization with nearly 1,000 affiliated and participating organizations, works year-round to provide sustainable solutions to communities.

If you would like to get involved with KAB, or learn more about our great programs, visit our Web site at www.kab.org.

We thank your community for its efforts to help keep America beautiful and for demonstrating the great American spirit of volunteerism in action.

We could not have accomplished these incredible feats without you.

G. Raymond Empson

President, Keep America Beautiful, Inc.