The Record Newspapers - Hometown News For Orange County, Texas

With spring right around the corner, the Texas Waterway Cleanup Program stands ready to help Texas rivers and lakes get well-deserved face-lifts. This statewide effort provides free cleanup supplies, educational materials, and promotional support to help Texans beautify and improve the quality of their local waterways.

  The program, a partnership between Keep Texas Beautiful and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, focuses on helping groups of any size host environmental education activities and cleanups of freshwater areas including lakes, rivers, creeks, and wetlands across the state. Participants include schools, government agencies, youth and scout groups, neighborhoods, businesses, or any group of concerned Texans.

“The Texas Waterway Cleanup offers such an easy way for people to beautify their communities that everyone should participate,” said Keep Texas Beautiful President Steve Hazlewood. “The program supports a wide range of activities and distributes, at no cost to the participant, many of the necessary tools for volunteers to help improve the water quality and aesthetic appeal of their state.”

Registrants in the program receive FREE cleanup supplies such as trash bags, disposable gloves, litter pickup tools, hand sanitizer, sunblock, scout patches, and volunteer giveaway items, as well as promotional support. Last fall, volunteers supported 142 cleanup and water quality events across the state, with more than 11,500 volunteers collecting more than 264,000 pounds of debris from and around Texas waterways.

To get more information on the Texas Waterway Cleanup Program, register an event, or find out if there is a cleanup scheduled near you, visit www.ktb.org or call 1-800-CLEAN-TX.

Keep Texas Beautiful, a statewide grassroots nonprofit, strives to educate and engage Texans to take responsibility for improving their community environment. KTB and its more than 340 affiliates work with government, businesses, civic groups, and volunteers to ensure that every Texan has the opportunity to take individual responsibility for making Texas the cleanest, most beautiful state in the nation. For more information on programs and events, call 1-800-CLEAN-TX or visit www.ktb.org.