Each year more than one million Americans unite to clean up parks, neighborhoods, and beaches.

Here are some ideas to that encourage us all to care for and improve the environment. These provide an opportunity for people to become involved in community improvement and make a visible difference.

Make sure to notify the media when planning any of these events. The nature of each one makes it a perfect news segment. Programs like these encourage other individuals and businesses to follow.

Green ideas for businesses

• Sponsor an area that welcomes visitors to your community. Keep it beautifully landscaped to show how much you care.
• Make your business beautiful by planting flowers, shrubberies, and trees.

• Organize competitions between local organizations to beautify their properties.
• Help your customers keep their community clean by distributing litterbags.
• Sponsor a tree planting ceremony in a public area.
• Adopt part of your community: a bus stop, roadside or small park and keep it clean all year round. Display signs that identify your adopted area.
• Start an office recycling program. Kick it off with a "clean your office" event.
• Encourage car pooling by providing incentives like reserved parking spaces for employees that car pool.
• Buy recycled products when possible.
• Hold a litter-free event. Make your next company event a litter-free by handing out litterbags to attendees.

Green ideas for art organizations

• Sponsor a "litter awareness" art show. Challenge community members to turn litter into something creative. Then display the pieces at a public art show.
• Organize an anti-litter poster competition.
• Host a coloring contest. Use our Sources of Litter coloring posters to spread an anti-litter message.
• Design and decorate trash receptacles to use in the community.

Green ideas for garden clubs

• Develop and maintain a community garden. Encourage composting to improve the soil and encourage recycling.
• Sponsor a school composting project and use the compost to improve the soil at the school.

• Start a public education campaign to encourage composting in your community. Use the compost to improve the soil at local parks and public places.
• Sponsor an area that welcomes visitors to your community. Keep it beautifully landscaped to show that you care.
• Start a forest with seedlings donated by a local garden center. Get permission from your local government to plant trees in public places. And offer citizens an opportunity to purchase a seedling in honor of a birth, anniversary, graduation, or wedding.

Green public relations ideas for community organizations

• Run a clean-your-community program. Distribute litterbags to promote your clean community message.
• Improve a wildlife habitat in your town.
• Build or improve a nature trail.
• Develop and maintain a bird sanctuary.

• Organize a leftover paint collection campaign. Mix the paint together to be used for painting over graffiti in your community.
• Clean up a local river, stream, lake or beach.
• Sponsor an environmental display at the local library. Topics could include recycling, litter prevention, composting, public land maintenance, and appliance disposal. Distribute brochures on the topics.

Keep America Beautiful, Inc., is a non-profit organization whose network of more than 500 local, statewide and international programs educate individuals about litter prevention and ways to reduce, reuse, recycle and properly manage waste materials. Through partnerships and strategic alliances with citizens, businesses and government, Keep America Beautiful's programs motivate millions of volunteers annually to beautify and improve their neighborhoods.