There are thousands of trails across the country. We’ll keep a log, so there’s no overlap and efforts are coordinated. Be safe and have fun!
You can go it alone, but we suggest you find a partner. One can act as a spotter to locate trash on the trail and within easy reach (leave the heavy cleaning to your Trail Cleanup Day). The catcher simply picks up the trash with salad/BBQ tongs and deposits in a trash bag (reduce, reuse & recycle). Don’t forget to take a pic and post.
You can have fun hiking, biking, skiing, climbing and riding! It’s “Your Trail Too” so pick it up. Have fun and tell us about it! Take a PIC or VIDEO and post on the blog. Make sure you log the miles you hiked and earn TRAIL sMILES. Recycle any bottles or cans and have fun.
Advocacy is the primary tool through which Clean Trails works to promote natural, pristine, and litter-free wild-places and the trails that lead to them. We encourage, enable, and empower our members and other individuals to raise awareness for the disparaging effects of litter on our local, regional, and national trail systems.
Our Clean Trails’ advocacy program promotes general awareness, responsibility, and educational activities for individuals, schools, businesses, and organizations. Through our Clean Trails advocates, we provide a local point of contact for city, county, state, and federal agencies to coordinate for a better outdoor experience.
With reduced funding for park and wilderness maintenance, litter is becoming a growing problem on our nation’s trail systems.
In the wake of budget cutbacks and the focus of our public systems on other activities, the role of maintaining our trails needs to fall upon us, the users. Our objective is to create a sense of pride and purpose for our trail systems; to keep them as pristine as the wild places to which they take us.
Studies show the highest indicator that someone will pick up litter is if they witness someone else picking up litter. Community Based Social Marketing (CBSM) studies are proving that peer group norms are more powerful than incentives, and when worked in concert with each other, they can provide impressive behavioral change impacts.
Our plans include development of a national network of trail stewards, as well as, educational and advocacy programs. Specific areas of service include: developing trail stewardship networks, awareness programming, Adopt-A-Trail, and Trail Box installation and maintenance. Our first course of action is to begin building our network by leveraging existing social media avenues through current channels and by encouraging responsibility through trailside events and activities.
Our trail boxes are a tool to promote personal responsibility and assist individuals and groups in maintaining a clean trail. The boxes are designed specifically to encourage casual participation in removal of litter from the outdoors. Box design has been field-tested and we have built pre-production prototypes.
Phase One: is an initial effort to set up pre-production and development. Funding is required for implementation: including design and development services; initial production run of 200 units; accessories, assembly, packaging and shipping.
Phase Two: consists of a pre-commercial production run of 500 units, which will include design and development; production of units and accessories, assembly, packaging, and shipping.
Phase Three: is projected as an initial commercial run of 10,000 units.
In preproduction testing, this project has proved to dramatically improve trail conditions. We’re looking for investors to help get this important project off the ground. Contact us to discuss our cobranding effort to make a difference on our nation’s trails.