Team BCPS Clean Green :15 Litter Challenge

About the Program

Category: County Resiliency (Best in Category)

Year: 2016

Team BCPS Clean Green 15 Litter Challenge is a new approach to encouraging litter clean-up and instilling in school children the understanding that litter is an unacceptable behavior that harms the environment. The program, a collaboration between the County's environmental department and school system, invites schools to compete for educational grants and prizes based on which "school community" registers the most 15-minute clean-ups on behalf of their school. Community groups could include school-based groups, places of worship, youth groups, civic or community groups, scout troops, sport teams, businesses or other organizations that wish to help clean up their community. The program resulted in 3,356 volunteers conducting 324 clean-ups in 2015, and 3,200 volunteers in 2014 doing more than 300 clean-ups. We are poised for growth in 2016. Most of the volunteers were school students, who gained a hands-on perspective on how litter contributes to waterway pollution and neighborhood degradation. The response has been enthusiastic, and each of the first two years of the program have resulted in four public schools being awarded grants ranging form $2,000 - $4,000 for lasting school-based environmental projects, and three more schools won STEM trainings or web-enabled iPads.