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WILKES-BARRE — When it comes to cleaning up neighborhoods, Greg Griffin has taken matters into his own hands.
And, for that matter, so have his helpers.
Their handiwork has partially filled a trash container placed by the railroad tracks near the McCarthy Tire retread plant parking lot off Butler Street.
For the past two weekends Griffin has coordinated a neighborhood cleanup with volunteers from the New Roots Recovery Center in Wilkes-Barre. They’ll be back out there again starting at 11 a.m. Saturday to pick up all sorts of trash dumped over the guide rails onto the wooded hillside along Thompson Street in the city’s North End.
Rather than just complain about the furniture, toys, flat-screen televisions and household garbage left in plain sight, Griffin, 65, a retired state correctional officer from Swoyersville, and the volunteers gathered up the junk and piled it into the container provided by the city.
“We believe citizens should work with the government for solutions,” Griffin said Thursday. His daughters, Colleen and Danielle, and daughter-in-law Brielle Adamovich surveyed the work they had ahead of them for the weekend.
“This is important to him,” said Colleen Griffin who traveled from Maryland for the holidays.
“The banks will be pristine,” the father said, pointing out the remaining junk, including a pile of orange-capped, used syringes.
The Wilkes-Barre Health Department has been notified to come get them. Volunteers will be directed away from them and told not to handle them, said Griffin as he held four of them in his right hand.
“Of course, I touched it,” Griffin said to make a point of the extent of the problem of people disposing garbage without regards for where they leave it, what it is and its effect.
“Litter creates crime. The neighborhood starts to deteriorate,” Griffin maintained.
It also discourages people from visiting and choosing Wilkes-Barre as a place to live and work, added Ted Wampole, executive director of the Luzerne County Convention & Visitors Bureau.
“From the visitors bureau’s perspective, we’re concerned about curb appeal,” Wampole said.
The county agency has followed the lead of the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau in its successful anti-littering initiative,”Pick Up The Poconos.”
In an Op-Ed Tuesday in the Times Leader, Wampole talked about the goals of the local effort to raise awareness of the littering problem, the negative effects on the environment and costs to residents.
Wampole said he speaks by phone almost daily with Griffin and has offered him support.
“They’re out there every single weekend. That shows that somebody gets it,” Wampole said.
Griffin encouraged more public participation in the cleanups. He’s been working with a core group of eight from New Roots and they’ve been to North Main, North River and Stark streets. Last month they conducted a large-scale cleanup in the area of Arch and Andover streets.
“I’ve always been concerned. I knew that we had to get the people involved,” Griffin said.
If someone can come out for an hour, that’s fine, Griffin said. As long as they are accompanied by an adult, children are welcome too.
“It’s kind of fun. We get a radio. We get them bags and gloves,” Griffin said. “Everyone works at their own speed.”
