Residents in the City of Euclid and the Collinwood neighborhood like to play dirty. And when Earth Day rolls around each year, volunteers in the neighboring communities get really dirty when they host a friendly competition to see which neighborhood can pick up the most trash.

The Big Clean, as it’s come to be named, occurred last Saturday, April 20, when more than 200 Euclid and Collinwood volunteers picked up trash and debris in the two communities during a friendly competition to see who could collect the most garbage.

The Big Clean - Volunteers Clean Up Euclid & CollinwoodThis year marks the seventh annual Big Clean, and this year Euclid claimed the title—collecting 204 bags of garbage, while Collinwood brought in 164 bags, which amounted to a grand total of 368 bags

“And that’s just bags,” says Linda Beck, Euclid mayoral administrative secretary and Keep Euclid Beautiful chair. “Altogether, that’s two-and-three-quarters tons of garbage. That's not [counting] car bumpers, swimming pools, tires, shopping carts and orange barrels that have lost their battle with a car. There’s so much other stuff—some discarded flooring that was on the side of the road, you know, we try to pick all that up while we're out.”

Although Collinwood lost the friendly competition, Collinwood organizer Stephen Love says the event is always a blast. “We had a wonderful time, even if Euclid beat us by a few bags of trash,” he says. “What matters most is that it’s healthy competition and we’re all in it to win it—with healthy people, a healthy community, a healthy Lake Erie, and a healthy planet.”

Beck does concede that Euclid is bigger than Collinwood in area and population, and therefore has more volunteers, but she also points out that Collinwood won the Big Clean in both 2021 and 2022. “I know that Collinwood, two years in a row, won and they kind of got a taste of victory,” she says. “We have more square footage, but Collinwood picks up a lot of trash.”

The Big Clean - Volunteers Clean Up Euclid & CollinwoodWhile she says she is not a competitive person, Beck says many of the volunteers become quite competitive when counting the amount of trash collected. “Everyone that turns in their bags, and they're like, ‘make sure you count this,’” she laughs. “And that day, they get very competitive.”

Love prefers to reflect on what the group accomplished in just one day. “We had more than 200 volunteers between the two communities fill almost 400 bags in total,” he says. “And that was all in our roadways, in our parks, and in our sewers.”

The Big Clean is always scheduled around the same time as Earth Day, says Beck, and she says it seems to be a time when people are ready for some spring cleaning.

“I think it makes people feel good, too,” Beck says.  “[One volunteer] would always say, ‘when the snow melts, litter blooms,’ and I always love that because you feel like you see [litter] everywhere. And I think everybody just loves the thought of spring cleaning, and they're kind of in the mood to do it. We seem to have hit a good target time with pairing it with Earth Day.”

The volunteers picked up their supplies at Euclid’s C.E. Orr Ice Arena on Milton Avenue in Euclid and came together for a celebration there at the end of the day.