With several hundred thousand visitors coming to Pittsburgh and millions more watching next spring’s National Football League Draft on television, the region is making a $1 million effort to clean up litter on local streets and rivers.
In football terms, Allegheny CleanWays will lead the multipronged effort dubbed “the Immaculate Collection” to make sure the city makes a good visual presentation. It’s catch phrase is “Blitz the Litter, Beautify the Burgh.”
In Pittsburgh terms, it’s time to redd up.
Conceiving the collection
Allegheny CleanWays held a news conference on Pittsburgh’s North Shore Wednesday to kick off the two-year effort. The immediate goal is to make sure the city makes a good impression during the draft in late April, but the hope is that this special effort sets a long-term standard for keeping litter off area streets and rivers.
The idea for the special litter collections grew out of discussions among local leadership groups such as VisitPITTSBURGH, Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, Riverlife, Pittsburgh Tomorrow and others.
“A lot of leaders [had been] looking around and saying, ‘The eyes of the world are about to be [on us] here. How can we tidy up before this [NFL Draft]?’” Caily Grube, executive director of Allegheny CleanWays, said in an interview earlier this week.
Eden Hall Foundation leaders approached Allegheny CleanWays this past spring with that goal: Ensure that NFL Draft visitors have a good impression when they travel to Pittsburgh next year. Although the agency has a 25-year track record of collecting waste on land and riverbanks, the foundation believed it had to pinpoint the cause of all that tossed trash and determine why and where it lands on highways in and out of the city.
Over two weeks, its staff accompanied Allegheny CleanWays on a roadway study that scoured the area and mapped out the problem. They found that state-maintained highways had the most litter on them, mostly because the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has only one crew for Allegheny, Beaver and Lawrence counties.
So PennDOT collects litter – whether it’s trash from convenience store purchases all the way up to what falls off haulers’ trucks that are not securely tarped – by hiring contractors through its Sponsor-a-Highway program. Local businesses that agree to be a sponsor hire cleanup crews, but only 11 highway miles in Allegheny County have sponsors.
With the draft as an impetus, the Immaculate Collection was conceived. A major component of the program is to increase sponsorship to 100 miles of highways leading into the city with special emphasis on Interstate 376, Interstate 279, Route 28, Route 65 and Route 380.
Grube said she constantly receives emails from people who want roadway and other litter issues brought under control. “Like, it’s embarrassing. When I have people coming into town, the exits look terrible,” she said.
The goal is to have the sponsored roads cleaned in September and October and again in April.
A coalition includes Pittsburgh’s and Allegheny County’s departments of public works, Friends of the Riverfront, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and Riverlife. Pittsburgh Tomorrow and Point Park University will identify and tackle other litter-prone areas. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office and other state elected officials also are involved.
Grube said Allegheny CleanWays already works with volunteers three to four times a week in Allegheny County communities. It will step up that work with a second litter crew that will give it “way more capacity.”
That crew will collect litter in the city every week between October and April, Grube said. The nonprofit had stopped working in Pittsburgh because Community Development Block Grant eligibility had been dropped or changed.
The Immaculate Collection effort, plus funding again becoming available through the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Thriving Communities grant – which had been turned off through earlier federal cuts and freezes – is making this portion of the project possible.
In addition to Eden Hall, the project has secured support from the Buhl Foundation, DBR & Co., Point Park University and a number of other foundations as well as corporate, nonprofit and individual donors. The goal is to raise $1 million by April 2026, according to a news release. The effort was one-quarter of the way there as of Wednesday’s launch. Grube is confident the rest will come.
Grube said the city’s hilltop communities, North Side, Hazelwood and other neighborhoods will be targeted for litter cleanup. When her nonprofit and Eden Hall conducted their study, “We saw a lot of visible hot spots of, like, illegal dump sites. They’re going to be working on taking care of those.”
The highway cleanup and sponsorship effort is the largest and costliest part of the Immaculate Collection, and Allegheny CleanWays is seeking more corporate sponsors to join in and bring more volunteers to sustain it.
College campuses will have a competition next spring to see who can collect the most litter, similar to Pittsburgh’s “garbage olympics,” a popular contest where neighborhood groups compete.
Pittsburgh Tomorrow, a group dedicated to involving young people in determining the future of the city, will have a series of events beginning next month encouraging high school students to help with the cleanup. Program CEO Doug Heuck said he expects 60-100 students for the kickoff Oct. 18 and looks forward to them demonstrating “a rebirth of spirit” that a century ago spurred the city’s manufacturing industry.
Over the years, Allegheny CleanWays has collected nearly 8 million pounds of trash across Allegheny County, including more than 50,000 tires. For the next year and the Immaculate Collection effort, Grube wants her organization and its supporters and volunteers to collect 256 tons of trash.
“That’s from all the rivers and the sites. That’s from all the municipalities that Allegheny CleanWays works with. … That’ll be much larger with all the community efforts and the Sponsor-a-Highway [program],” she said.
Grube has led Allegheny CleanWays for two years, and when she started the staff told her they felt as if they would be picking up litter in perpetuity. Employees didn’t believe they could “move the needle on this unless we go further upstream and like, affect larger systems.”
So the Immaculate Collection effort is personally gratifying.
“… This project is allowing us to affect the larger systems of like government agencies, coordinating together and solving problems together,” Grube said. “It’s helping us bring education wide scale, and then also to bring on this massive sponsor-a-highway project, which when I started, it was like, mythical.”
The draft itself
With the draft seven months away, a lot of logistical legwork continues to determine exactly where the main events will take place – the parking lots outside Acrisure Stadium, Point State Park or somewhere else.
In an interview after Wednesday’s news conference, Derek Dawson, vice president of strategic initiatives for VisitPITTSBURGH, said the NFL is “very, very close” to choosing the main venue. A key factor in the league’s planning efforts is the ability to provide strong security at the site.
Dawson said because of the advance work done by a 150-member subcommittee, the city should have no problem waiting for the league’s decision. Once that is made, local planners can make formal arrangements with local businesses for items like dozens of golf carts, thousands of cases of bottled water, electric facilities, portable toilets and other items needed to pull off a massive event.
“The NFL will make the final call,” he said. “We’re in a very good position to move forward when they make the choice.”
River tour
Ben Halliburton’s job as water program coordinator with Allegheny CleanWays is to keep area waterways clear of litter and other debris.
During a tour with the agency’s other boat on a perfectly sunny windless Wednesday, Halliburton said he’s seen progress on reducing river trash in the 18 months he’s been on the job. Typically, he will be on the river two or three times a week, but in the lead up to the draft the agency will add another day.
This year, the agency has a contract with Riverlife to increase its efforts, and Riverlife paid for a small crane to be added to the 30-foot Jon boat that allows it to free debris from areas like the Market Street Pier on the North Shore of the Allegheny River under the Fort Duquesne Bridge. When high water flows down the river, debris often catches around the upriver side of the pier, but Halliburton and a crew spent three days clearing all but a few larger logs from the site this spring.
In addition to the crane, Halliburton said crews use trash pickers and sometimes drag nets to catch floating litter. Three days of work around the Emsworth Lock and Dam a couple of weeks ago resulted in hauling away about 6,000 pounds of debris.
Another problem area is the combined sewer outlet just upriver on the Downtown side from the Smithfield Street Bridge on the Monongahela River. Heavy rains cause the combination sewers to overflow into the river with raw sewage and whatever other street debris can get past the sewer grate.
“In big rains, that shoots out tons of plastic and other stuff,” Halliburton said, pointing at the sewer opening. “We’re making progress. It’s amazing what many hands can do.”
The progress is impressive because the agency started only 25 years ago and is trying to deal with not only new debris but also material that accumulated during the previous 200 years.
“It’s not terrible, not like other cities,” he said.
For the future
Grube sees the Immaculate Collection as an opportunity to build a cleaner future. The involvement of high school and college students is designed to make a sea change in the way residents view litter.
Education is a big factor in changing years of bad habits, she said, but studies have shown cleaner streets lead to fundamental differences like lower crime rates and better mental and physical health for residents. Additionally, more trash containers result in less litter.
“It affects how we see ourselves,” she said during the news conference. “When we come together, we can do hard things.”
Mayor Ed Gainey called the draft the opportunity to show the world “the spirit of who we are and the spirit of who we will become.”
“We done had enough practice. Let’s get the game on.”
Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.
Ed covers transportation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at eblazina@unionprogress.com.