Keep Virginia Beautiful & America Recycles Day

So, the election is over and everyone can get back to their lives.

But we’ve been busy.  On Thursday, November 15th, we will be joining thousands of folks across the country to celebrate America Recycles Day.  To do our part, we will be partnering with Dominion Virginia Power and Virginia Green to institute a program that we’ve been working on for quite some time.  In addition to some new educational signage and trail cleaning at First Landing State Park in Virginia Beach, Lake Anna State Park in Spotsylvania and Leesylvania State Park in Woodbridge, we will be rolling out several recycling containers in each of the parks.

Keeping Virginia Beautiful is no easy task, but a $25,000 grant from Dominion will allow us to make a dent by putting between 6 and 8 of these carts in all 35 of our state parks.  This is a total of more than 250 carts for the parks.  The Virginia State Parks are award winning, and possibly the best expression of our mission at Keep Virginia Beautiful.  Environmental education and natural resource stewardship are important parts of the mission of the Virginia State Parks, and their limited resources have made tackling recycling a difficult task.  While they all have some sort of program, having these large, highly visible containers for use by park visitors will lead them further down the road to improving their recycling efforts.

State Parks Director Joe Elton said,

“This partnership with Keep Virginia Beautiful and Dominion will pay huge dividends for all Virginians.  The recycling containers allow us to greatly increase our in-park recycling efforts, keeping valuable resources out of our landfills.  Perhaps more importantly, the signage and our commitment to bring a recycling message to our visitors will encourage more Virginians to recycle at home and at work.”

America Recycles Day is an initiative of our parent organization, Keep America Beautiful.  Brenda Pulley of KAB said,

“We are very proud supporters of Keep Virginia Beautiful’s America Recycles Day events and commend their efforts to promote recycling in Virginia.  Recycling is the easiest thing we can all do to save energy, conserve natural resources and create green jobs.  Collectively, through events like these, we aim to make recycling bigger and better 365 days a year.”

America Recycles Day is the only nationally recognized day and community-driven awareness event dedicated to promoting and celebrating recycling in the United States.

Our partner at Dominion, Chief Environmental Officer Pamela Faggert said,

“The protection of the environment is not only important to Dominion as a company, but also to our employees.  Many of them will volunteer to work at three State Parks on November 15th, installing recycling carts and cleaning up the grounds.  We remain environmentally responsible and wholeheartedly support spreading the recycling message to all those who visit Virginia’s State Parks.”

Our State Parks are the starting point of all that we hold beautiful and natural in our state.  By helping all 35 of our parks, Keep Virginia Beautiful and our partnerships with Dominion Virginia Power, Virginia Green and Keep America Beautiful will be able to reach the hundreds of thousands of visitors to our parks with our recycling message.

Thank you to our partners, and we will now look to YOU to visit our State Parks and use those bins!