Tybee Island is looking for volunteer citizens, business owners and government officials who are ready to “Fight Dirty” against the trash that litters their town.
At a city-hosted workshop Thursday, a dozen or so representatives from these stakeholder groups got together to continue planning for litter reduction that began with a larger meeting last fall.
While the purpose of the previous gathering was to come up with ideas for reducing the worst offenders on Tybee’s beaches and streets, the object this time was to take those initial proposals and boil them down even further into achievable plans for cutting back on litter.
The facilitator for both workshops, Becky Setliff, said Thursday that based on the work done this week, new steering and finance committees may need to be formed to turn those plans into reality.
“We’re looking for people who want to be on the ‘Fight Dirty’ team,” Setliff said. “We need people who are actually interested in doing work with that. It takes some creative minds and interest.”
One person guaranteed to continue the work is Diane Kaufman, a member of the city’s Main Street Committee and regular volunteer on beach sweeps who said she was driven to get involved to get rid of the trash at the close of the first litter workshop.
“It came from me banging my head on the table (at the workshop),” Kaufman said Thursday. She said she complained the problem seemed to be everywhere. Then Tybee Mayor Jason Buelterman challenged her to get involved, Kaufman said, and she accepted the challenge.
“Nobody doesn’t want to have a clean beach,” she said. “I’m not going to complain any more about the trash. I’m just going to do it.”
Her attitude is what the growing grass-roots effort is looking for, said Tim Arnold, whose effort to collect trash from the beach has burgeoned in recent months from just himself and his wife to regular beach sweeps with groups of volunteers.
At last count, the group had collected more than 26,000 items of trash from Tybee Island’s beach.
FIGHT DIRTY ON TYBEE ISLAND
To get involved in the Fight Dirty effort, contact Arnold by email at [email protected]. More information about his regular beach sweeps is online at tybeecleanbeach.simpl.com.
