With the Pittsburgh-hosted 2026 NFL Draft on the horizon, city officials are launching a campaign to clean litter out of roadways, waterways, and neighborhoods.
Community partners and foundations including Allegheny County Department of Public Works, Allegheny Cleanways, and City of Pittsburgh came together this week to create the multi-month project “Immaculate Collection.” The region-wide initiative aims to deep-clean Pittsburgh’s highways, rivers, and neighborhoods ahead of the 2026 NFL Draft in the spring.
Community partners gathered for their official launch ceremony yesterday detailing the importance of not only cleaning up the neighborhoods for the draft, but maintaining clean-up efforts for Pittsburgh residents.
“We all know driving around our community, there’s certainly areas where there’s hot spots of litter that feels bad even for us when we see it as residents,” said Caily Grube, Executive Director of Allegheny Cleanways. “So we have this opportunity with the NFL draft to make a great first impression on the hundreds of thousands of people who are going to be visiting.”
Not only is this beautification effort, but a safety promotion as litter can lower property value, impact business, and cause health problems within a community, according to the city’s sustainable procurement specialist, Omoye Aikhuele.
“We need to get more attention to the issues of litter in our neighborhood, because it impacts our health. The sense of place gets ruined when it’s full of litter, people don’t feel safe to go outside. So there’s a cycle of events that will start when an area is littered and not kept up,” Aikhuele said.
Multiple clean up efforts are planned around the city in coming months including:
- Highway cleanups tackling 100 miles of highways including I-376, I-279, SR-65, and SR-380,
- City of Pittsburgh’s annual Garbage Olympics,
- Point Park University-led College Campus Cleanups,
- Pittsburgh Tomorrow High School Leadership Corps, Pittsburgh Promise, and Friends of the Riverfront’s Northside weeding and litter cleanups, and
- Collective boat cleanups and neighborhood beautification.
