Beach season on Tybee Island is just around the corner, and city officials are getting their trash in order.
The Tybee City Council has approved a budget amendment that provides an additional $44,000 toward beach improvement supplies and materials.
Among the items the council agreed to buy are cigarette receptacles for the most popular parking lots and crossovers as well as new containers for plastic bags and films.
The move comes after a vote last month to purchase new recycling barrels and restrictive lids for the island’s beaches.
The purchases will go a long way to address many of items that most often litter the beach, said Tim Arnold, who heads a volunteer group on the island known as Tybee Clean Beach.
His group usually meets each Sunday on the island to pick up trash. But with a shortage of volunteers over the offseason, he said the group recently spent some time around the crossovers, where they found an ample supply of discarded bottles, cans and cigarette butts.
“I think the ashtrays and all the barrels that you’re putting out will make a huge difference,” he said.
Arnold also suggested the city could reinstitute garbage pickup as a community service sentence in the municipal court and add crossovers to the regular beach patrol to make an even bigger impact.
In addition, the city approved a new contract for garbage pickup with Pooler-based Atlantic Waste Services. Council members signed off on a six-month trial of curbside pickup once a week and side-door pickup once a week for trash, recycling and yard waste at a combined monthly cost of $25.56.
City residents Amy Gaster and Keith Gay, both professionals in Tybee’s short term rental industry, supported the curbside pickup as a way of reducing the number of trash cans on the street during the week.
“I think if Tybee’s trying to be a sustainable community, (curbside pickup) should be once a week,” Gaster said. “I would urge you to go with something that would rid the city’s streets of the blight of trash cans.”
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