Your town’s name on the cans you already own.

The short version

Keep Maine Beautiful is a Maine nonprofit. We put a town’s name on a public trash can. A local business pays for it. The town empties it, on the route it already runs.

If your town already has public cans, including BigBelly units, the first step costs nothing. We put your town’s name on cans you own and service today.

A trash can is a container. A can that carries your town’s name, the words Keep ME Beautiful, and a thank-you to the local business behind it — that is an invitation.

On the can the words read Keep ME Beautiful. Two letters, one whole idea: Maine is ME, and ME is the town whose name sits above it. The organization behind it is Keep Maine Beautiful, a Maine nonprofit.

What we’re proposing

What it costs the town

Nothing. No purchase. No maintenance contract. No staff time beyond saying yes and doing the pickups you already do.

Sponsors pay for the program. That is the whole idea. A local business gets to stand behind something people see every day, and the town gets it without spending anything.

Recognition, not advertising

We hold this line firmly. A sponsor is thanked in plain words. No logo on the can. No slogan. No offer. Nothing that turns a public can into a billboard.

If a can carries a code to scan, it opens that can’s own page on our site: where it is, a thank-you to the sponsor, and how the program works. It never sends anyone to a sponsor’s store, and it collects nothing about the person who scanned it.

A can lasts about ten years, and we would like a sponsor to stay for all ten. Sponsorship runs twelve months at a time and renews, so a business can start small and stay as long as it likes. If the panel ever needs to change, we change it.

What the town provides

• Permission, and a yes on which cans and where.
• The pickups you already do. No extra collections, no route changes.
• One person we can call, so we are not chasing anyone.
• Who owns the cans. Some are the town’s, some belong to a vendor, and that changes what we can do with each one.

What we provide

• The panel: design, production, and putting it on, at no cost to the town.
• The sponsor, start to finish. We find them, sign them, renew them, and thank them.
• One person responsible, not a shared inbox.
• Reports on cleanup work as it happens: what was picked up, where, and what kind.

What the Crew does, and how they report it

Volunteers walk their own roads and shorelines on their own time. Nothing runs through your department. What it produces is a record, and that record comes back to you.

How the reporting works

Every haul is photographed, sorted, and logged: what was picked up, where, and how much. We send that to you as it happens.

Sometimes a volunteer finds something a bag cannot fix. A can overflowing. A hazard. Something too heavy to carry out. Then we send a note to your contact with what was seen, where, and when, and photos attached. You decide what to do about it.

Those notes go out when there is something worth acting on, not on a schedule. They come to the town first, they come privately, and we do not publish them.

The Community Crew is people across Maine who care about this and want to be counted. How much they do in any one town will vary, and we will not guess at a number. Here is what we promise instead: whatever happens gets written down, and what gets written down comes back to you.

We think it grows. A can with a town’s name on it shows the town has stood up for itself, and people join something already happening where they live far more readily than they join an idea. Where a town shows up first, we expect the Crew to grow faster.

Nobody can promise that number. It is why going first is worth something. The towns that move early get the program sooner, and they become the ones other Maine towns look at when they decide.

One bag is an afternoon. A place logged twenty times over a season is something a town can act on.

Why a town might want this

A clean street is about welcome before it is about maintenance. Maine hosts millions of visitors a year, and what they see driving into town is the first thing the town says about itself.

A can with your town’s name says someone looks after this place. It says it every day, to everyone who walks past, for as long as it stands there.