JACKSON TWP. — Donna Brunton has lived in her house since 1974 where she created memories and built a foundation in the community.
As the years went on, it became more difficult for her to maintain the upkeep on the outside of her home, resulting in trash, appliances and other items piling up in her backyard and nearby ravine.
Physical and financial limitations prevented her from cleaning up the property like she had wanted. That’s where Keep Brown County Beautiful stepped in to help.
Earlier this month, Brunton had tears in her eyes as she watched volunteers with Keep Brown County Beautiful and the Cummins Community Involvement Team work to clean up her property.
“It’s a property clean of junk. It did feel very, very good,” Brunton said of the cleanup.
Cleaning up the outside of her home has been crossed off her to do list that is full with other projects in her house she is trying to manage.
“I don’t have a lot of energy. I did not have any ability to get rid of it. There wasn’t anybody to help me that was physically able to, so it was wonderful they came. I appreciated it,” she said.
Volunteers spent less than two hours at the home located not far from Helmsburg cleaning up the backyard and ravine on June 6. They removed approximately one ton of trash. Nine appliances, trash cans, weed eaters, lawnmowers, fencing and a basketball hoop were all set aside to be recycled, according to KBCB member Phil Stephens, who is also the director of the Brown County Recycle Center.
“We recycled as much as we threw away,” he said.
KBCB member Cathy Paradise was also one of the volunteers who helped with the cleanup. KBCB was formed in 2015 as a local chapter of Keep America Beautiful.
The mission of KBCB is to educate, increase recycling and end littering in the community, and to beautify the environment.
“We started out mainly doing roadside clean up,” Paradise said.
KBCB continues to do roadside cleanups, but Paradise said the issue of littering along county roads is “almost impossible to control.”
“You can clean up a road and two weeks later it needs it again,” she said.
April was the Great American Clean-up month sponsored by Keep America Beautiful. To recognize the month, Keep Brown County Beautiful offered to help clean up two properties in the county at no charge to the property owner. Brunton’s home was the first project.
In the past KBCB has completed cleanups on non-residential properties but this is the first time a cleanup service has been offered to homeowners. Properties were picked based on the owner’s physical or financial needs that prevent them from cleaning up like they wish.
In May, the nonprofit completed its biggest job yet alongside Cummins’ CIT volunteers cleaning up the landscaping at the Brown County Community Foundation.
But as the nonprofit takes on bigger residential projects the need for funding is growing to cover the cost of dumpsters.
“Even a small one (dumpster) is around $500,” Stephens said.
So far, KBCB has six residents who have reached out about getting help cleaning up the outside of their properties. Paradise said that KBCB wants to focus on helping people such as Brunton who do not have the resources or ability to clean themselves.
The hope is to do three other cleanups this year and continue to grow the list of interested residents for next year’s cleanup projects. One of the projects is a property that has mobile homes on it that need removed. That will require additional funding outside of grants KBCB hopes to receive from Cummins to help cover costs for the remaining projects.
Donations can be sent to Keep Brown County Beautiful at 176 Old State Road 46 Nashville, Indiana 47448.
Completing these clean up projects is a way for KBCB to serve its community by protecting the environment here.
“We care about the environment,” Paradise said.
“This is where we live and raise our children. … We want clean water, clean air, a lot of these things contaminate the ground water. If you think about having all of these trash bags, you don’t know what’s in them, we’ve been to places where there were great big barrels. We don’t know what’s in them.”
Paradise said that a part of the problem on some of these properties can be attributed to when the county’s landfill closed in the early 1990s, leaving residents with no nearby spot to get rid of their trash.
“People just piled up their stuff. They didn’t know what to do,” she said.
With helping residents dispose of trash in mind, volunteers from KBCB and staff from the recycle center will work together again this year to host the third Dumpster Day. The date for Dumpster Day will be announced later this year.
Thanks to a grant from the Brown County Community Foundation, there will be several large dumpsters placed in the back of the recycle center where residents can dump their trash for free.
“It is very popular. We don’t have landfill. It will give people opportunity to get rid of whatever has accumulated around their house,” Paradise said.
About 8 tons of trash from all over the county was collected and properly disposed of during last year’s Dumpster Day. There will also be an electronic recycling day on Sept. 17.
“It helps keep it (trash) off the roads or being dumped,” Paradise said.
