The Michigan Department of Transportation’s next Adopt A Highway cleanup week is coming up next week, and local teams will be hitting up the sides of roads to pick up litter. Among them is the Home Builders Association of Southwestern Michigan, which is doing its first ever Adopt A Highway event.
HBA Executive Officer Patty Knicker tells us the team wanted to find a way to give back, so it’s signed on to spruce up the I-94 Exit 23 Park-N-Ride, behind Starbucks in Stevensville. She says she used to take part in the highway cleanups at a previous employer and wanted to bring the experience to the HBA.
“A lot of our members here are spread out too much,” Knicker said. “They don’t always have the opportunity to meet each other. So this would be a great way for us not only to help clean up our area, but then socialize afterwards.”
Knicker says she reached out to MDOT about creating a team and adopting a section of road and heard back quickly. Now her team of about six will be out there near Exit 23 next Thursday, July 16 from 4 to 6 p.m. to pick up trash.
“To make it fun and enticing, I put together a bingo card. So we make it into a little game to see what we could find the most unusual [items]. You’ve got a lot, from clothes to bottles to shoes, everything. So we try to come up with some fun game to see who’s the winner.”
People are invited to come and help with the HBA’s event, or they can create volunteer groups of their own to adopt a highway.
MDOT says the Adopt-A-Highway program began in Michigan in 1990. As of last year, about 2,600 groups have adopted more than 6,000 miles of state highway through the program. An estimated 19,000 participants collected almost 40,000 bags of trash from roadsides through the program last year.
You can learn more about the Adopt a Highway program right here.
