Great Savannah Litter Pickup helps Savannah shine

SAVANNAH, GA (WTOC) - Saturday members of nearly 75 neighborhood associations and civic organizations, rolled up their sleeves for the Great Savannah Litter Pickup.

“This is the first day of the last day of litter in Savannah," said Savannah Mayor Eddie DeLoach.

After making the streets of Savannah shine, the city and its partners celebrated their efforts and showed off all of the trash they were able to collect. Business leaders in Savannah even pitched

“When I drive around Savannah and our see our cups it’s like a little knife in my heart every time I see one. We unfortunately have a lot of litter that comes from our establishments and we want to do whatever we can to eliminate it," said Greg Parker, CEO of Parker’s.

Keep Savannah Clean is dedicated to reducing litter in Savannah by 50 percent through education, community outreach and enforcement. The initiative originally launched in 2015 and organizers have been focusing recently on educating Savannah’s youth about the importance of litter clean-up.

“We try to educate the kids at an earlier age so they will understand the importance of keeping it clean. If you haven’t been educated you wont know," said DeLoach.

Mayor DeLoach says while educating the youth is important, it is also important that we remind the citizens to take part in the effort as well.

“If we are going to get it really tackled we got to have each individual person here to participate and that’ s what – that’s the critical thing we got to do here.”

The next phase of the project will soon take off. You’ll start to see commercials, signs and billboards with local Savannah stars on them. One of those stars, Flau’ jae, was at the news conference Saturday. She wrote a wrap about the initiative.

“I was like we can talk about it but music makes everything ten times better. Everybody love music. Everybody listening. I was like how about we just put music in it so people would be like ok why don’t I just put it in the trash can instead of throwing it on the ground," said Flau’ jae.

Soon signs with her photo and a message will be seen around the city.

Copyright 2019 WTOC. All rights reserved.