Cleanup events scheduled

If you have ever complained about litter in the streets or along the banks of the Ohio River, you have a couple of opportunities to actually do something about the problem.

The Portsmouth City Cleanup Day is scheduled for June 4 and will begin at 8 a.m. The dumpsters at the Portsmouth Municipal Building will stop accepting trash at 2:30 p.m., but the cleanup will continue until 3 p.m.

“All the volunteers and people in the community who want to come to the cleanup will meet here at the Portsmouth Municipal Building and have coffee and donuts at around 7:30-8 (a.m.) o’clock, to get a good game plan and disperse into groups,” Municipal Court Probation Officer Jonathan Page said.

Page said several groups are participants in the event, including several treatment facilities, such as the Counseling Center, Mahajans (Therapeutics), Shawnee Mental Health, Life-Air and many of the city employees and Municipal Court workers.

“The more the merrier,” Page said. “The more people we have down here the most trash we are able to pick up and put a big dent in the littering in the city of Portsmouth.”

Page said the bags for the cleanup are provided through “Keep America Beautiful,” and through the Lawrence-Scioto Solid Waste Management District, which also provides gloves for the volunteers.

“We’ve got dump trucks and there’s garbage trucks from the city that will go around to the different groups and pick up all of the stuff we collect,” Page said.

Be sure to also mark your calendar for Saturday, June 18 for the annual Ohio River Sweep up and down the Ohio River. Last year thousands of people volunteered to clean litter from the river banks. Ohio River Sweep hosts over 100 locations along the Ohio River and some of its tributaries.

“It will be on Court Street (Landing) and it goes from 8 (a.m.) to 1 (p.m.),” Jeff Crippen of the Lawrence-Scioto Solid Waste Management District said. “They’re going to do it over to the (Earl Thomas Conley) Riverside Park over on the west wide too.”

Crippen said students from Upward Bound will come out on Friday, June 17 and clean prior to the actual River Sweep event.

“Last year I had about a hundred of them on Court Street,” Crippen said.

By Frank Lewis

[email protected]

Reach Frank Lewis at 740-353-3101, ext. 1928, or on Twitter @franklewis.

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