While traffic rolls by, they scour the space alongside Bella Vista's roads to remove the accumulated garbage.
Volunteers are organizing over social media with plans to clean up litter all across Bella Vista.
Rebecca Fraley said her family and friends got started cleaning alongside roads recently when her boy, Nathaniel Sanders, 8, and some of his friends had more energy than they knew what to do with and she was feeling frustrated at the litter near their home strewn alongside Oldham Road.
They picked up eight bags of trash in that first day and decided to make it a regular thing, she said.
"I just got sick and tired of seeing it," she said.
Fraley said after starting in earlier this year, she started to connect with other people who are involved in cleaning up Bella Vista garbage.
Marci Downing operates Pick The Town Green, a Facebook page that is promoting and tracking efforts to clean up Bella Vista's streets. She's keeping a map and updating it as social media users report which streets they've tidied, she said.
Downing said she started the page after meeting up with Fraley and Tim Pschierer, proprietor of Green Ninja taxi and organizer of the annual Six-in-60 highway cleanup event.
Joining is simple, she said.
"Pick a street and go out and pick," she said.
Downing said she hopes to help organize cleanup efforts every March from here on out, though this year's work started formally about a week ago.
"This year we're winging it a little bit," she said. "It really looks like it's catching on."
The cleanup will culminate in the Six-in-60, which is scheduled for March 28, she said.
Tim Pschierer, who is organizing the Six-in-60 event, said he's extremely pleased to see this widespread volunteer effort.
"I don't like to see litter," he said.
Pschierer said he expects to see a lot of volunteers, particularly for the upcoming highway cleanup event.
Fraley said this is the perfect time of year to start cleaning. It's warm enough to enjoy being outside, but the ticks and chiggers aren't out and about and the mowers haven't started shredding the garbage into thousands of tiny, impossible-to-find pieces yet.
They've found some strange stuff among the trash, including a grass-seed spreader and a knife sheath, plus a great deal of alcohol-related garbage as well as some syringes, pipes, and other drug related materials, she said.
It's also been great exercise, she said, and it's a good outlet for the kids, who don't really look at it as work.
"He doesn't really consider it a chore," she said.
Sanders said he's glad to be out working to help the community.
Asked what his favorite part of picking trash was, he responded "helping the neighborhood and all the animals."
General News on 03/11/2020