Our Mission is to engage Clark County residents to take pride, ownership, and responsibility for enhancing their community’s environment.

What we do: We all recognize that a cleaner community appears to be safer, healthier, more prosperous, and more welcoming. Not unlike many other communities, and in spite of all our best efforts, Clark County has wrestled for years with the challenges of litter, graffiti, and general mismanagement of trash.

With the intent of bringing these issues into focus and motivating the wider community to join in making improvements, a collaborative effort to initiate a local Keep America Beautiful (KAB) program has resulted in the organization of Keep Clark County Beautiful, or KCCB. This national affiliation helps to highlight the value of community beautification and putting waste in its proper place and offers proven models and tools that enhance our ability to make a difference here in Clark County. Coordinated by the Clark County Solid Waste District, we are one of more than one thousand communities participating in the KAB network.

How does Keep America Beautiful work?

KAB was established in 1953 and is the nation’s largest volunteer based community action and education organization. KAB strives to change behaviors and improve communities by focusing on:

• Litter Prevention: Defining litter, identifying the cause, preventing it, organizing clean-ups, and properly handling discarded wastes in our community.
• Waste Reduction: Reducing the impact of mismanaged solid waste in our communities through integrated programs including source reduction, reuse, recycling, and education.
• Beautification: Improving the visual aspects of our communities through programs that beautify our environment including community gardens, vacant lot restoration, highway beautification, urban forests, native and wildflower plantings, as well as graffiti prevention and abatement.

The KAB guiding principles

• Education: the key to encouraging positive behaviors toward community improvement.
• Individual Responsibility: Inspiring individuals to become more engaged as citizens and stewards of the environment.
• Public-Private Partnerships: broad-based community alliances are essential to achieving sustainable community improvement.
• Volunteer Action: Engaging volunteers extends the reach of educational efforts and multiplies the impact of our actions.

KCCB supports the Great American Cleanup, a national volunteer litter collection drive held from March through May. Contact the Waste Management District at 521.2020 or click here for more information.

We also offer assistance to groups and individuals interested in the Adopt-a-Road and Adopt-a-Spot programs, providing clean-up supplies such as trash bags, gloves, litter grabbers, safety equipment, and more.

Graffiti removal is a constant hassle in Clark County. In 2009, KCCB and partners worked together to acquire a graffiti removal unit — able to blast away or cover large areas of graffiti quickly and easily. The unit consists of a trailer equipped with a generator, air compressor and a blaster that sprays a mixture of water and a baking-soda compound that quickly removes paint from surfaces but does not damage plants or the environment. The unit is now controlled and operated by the City of Springfield, but is available to other governmental entities and can be used on private property in some cases. For information or to report graffiti on public property, call Chris Moore, City Service Director, at (937) 525-5800. To report graffiti on private property in Springfield, call Code Enforcement, 324-7385.