Q&A with Kimberly White, Executive Director of Keep Cobb Beautiful
Have you ever wondered how sustainability might evolve? Join us for a conversation about environmental stewardship, the future of recycling, and what you can do to make a difference.
You’ve been working in the sustainability field for many years now. What inspired you to become an advocate for the environment?
I believe everyone has the right to live in a safe and clean environment. I think it’s really important to be good stewards of our communities and to promote new ways of finding solutions to better our world. This particular field has been around for a long time, and the way things were done many years ago is not the way they’ll be done in the future. I had lots of hopes and dreams about how I wanted to see my community progress, as well as the country, and the world even, and I thought, what better way to make my voice heard than to jump in there and make a positive impact?
I initially went to school for international civil rights. I wanted to be a lawyer, and I studied in Spain, where I was exposed to a full life of conservation. Citizens of Spain went through their civil war a lot more recently in history than we did, and there are still people alive who can recall its aftermath. They remember not having access to water or electricity, or other basic human necessities, so they did things like hang their clothes to dry to save electricity. It’s something that lives on to this day. While living there, I didn’t necessarily recognize how different the culture was, but when I came home to the United States, I saw the juxtaposition, and thought, there’s got to be a better way. It was kind of my “aha” moment. I still had one year of college left, and I changed gears and focused on equity of communities with environmental stewardship instead. For me, it’s about being able to convey to people that they’re a part of the solution. Our shared experiences shape our culture.
People look at Keep America Beautiful Affiliates and say they’re the people who pick up litter, but what we are really doing is forming a cultural norm that will support clean and green communities. It’s critical work at a time when all kinds of reports have been coming out about climate change and how our world is being impacted. All these years that we’ve spent educating and involving people have been important, but it’s now time to do something even more drastic. We have to make sweeping changes to protect the environment, and we have to start with changing behaviors and attitudes.
What are some of your most memorable moments over the years?
We have a number of very large-scale recycling events. I love helping our community keep these items out of landfills, and make sure they’re not littering our streams or roadsides. I am always in awe watching people who care about the environment come out to recycle items the right way. We typically have anywhere from 50 to 60 volunteers, and 2,400 participating cars. I am always thrilled and exhausted after these events, but they’re also some of my favorite days. They’re really inspiring.
I would also be remiss not to mention the Hefty® EnergyBag® program. I originally applied when it was open to the entire country, and only two locations were chosen: Boise, Idaho and Cobb County, Georgia. We were pioneers in a community-driven program that collects hard-to-recycle plastics (flexible film, straws, poly-styrene, packing peanuts, etc.). We’re the first in the Southeast. This is huge for us, because a lot of other states have stricter policies or ordinances that regulate how they handle plastic waste, but we do not here in Georgia. It’s consumer-driven recycling at its best! Our program has been super successful, and it’s been wonderful to see people be so passionate about recycling and doing the right thing for the environment. We started off small-scale, with 20,000 residents that we wanted to sign up. We’ve continued to grow, and now you can purchase the orange bags at local retail stores and online at HeftyEnergyBag.com. You can also bring them to the Smyrna Recycling Center or the CHaRM Center in Atlanta if you don’t have a hauler that participates. I am excited to be a part of the team helping to get several other counties on board and rolled in with these programs in the next year. If you would like your county to participate, please reach out to me to get those conversations started.
One of Keep Cobb Beautiful’s numerous recycling events
How did working through the pandemic change your routine/priorities? Many of us had to get creative. Did it inspire you to make any lasting changes?
I think so. We had to come up with new ways to communicate, to continue to hold environmental education classes, to offer the same options that we’ve always offered in the past but in a different way. We’re now really well-versed in Zoom and other virtual platforms. In facing the pandemic, we may have been pushed much more quickly to come up with innovative sustainability solutions, but it has benefited us as a community and as a whole to think outside the box. We struggled in the beginning with recycling temporarily not being picked up due to driver shortages, for example, but that led us to being able to optimize drop-off locations. Residents have responded in a huge way by dropping items off rather than waiting for haulers to pick them up. We still want to offer a comprehensive system, but it made us reevaluate what’s important and how we can meet the needs of the time that we’re in. For a long time, our response to environmental measures has been to take one step at a time, but during the pandemic, we’ve had to take huge leaps and bounds to make an impact. I think that mindset of flexibility is going to help us in the future, even when we get through this.
What more do you envision for Keep Cobb Beautiful? When you think about the future, what do you get excited about?
I’d love to see Keep Cobb Beautiful offer residents a larger variety of options for recycling and processing their waste (integrated solutions with permanent drop-off locations). In the same way that I brought the Hefty® EnergyBag® program here, I would like to see additional innovative programs to help our community and Georgia as a whole. When one community is able to take an initiative and be so successful with it, it benefits us all. Others see it as an example, and they’re able to jump on board and create a great solution that fits their needs.
Any advice for people looking to make their communities cleaner, greener, or more beautiful?
Absolutely. Recently I had the privilege to interact with the Greening Youth Foundation and learned the difference between an ally, an advocate, and an ambassador. An ally is someone who supports a cause; for example - they educate themselves about recycling and where things go, and they usually recycle at home. The advocate goes a step further by talking to neighbors and getting them to recycle; they do what they can to get others on board with the cause. But the ambassador is the leader, the change agent. They make the world a better place because they use all of their resources to fight for the cause they believe in. This is how I see all of us as affiliate directors, staff, and volunteers. We work tiny little miracles into the everyday lives of our community members to make sure our communities are clean, green and beautiful for generations to come. Everyone can start small and build from where they are.