Plastic soda bottles, beer cans and packaging cardboard filled plastic bags Oct. 16 as some members of the University of Wisconsin-Stout Marketing and Business Education Association took to Highway 72 just south of Downsville to clean up trash from the roadside.
The organization maintains two miles of Highway 72 just off of Highway 25 as part of Wisconsin’s Adopt a Highway program.
With a temperature hanging around 37 degrees, students pulled on gloves, masks and safety vests to prepare for the cleanup.
First-year student and marketing and business education major Alexa Evers, of Kaukauna, was joining in her first activity with the club. “So far it’s been fun,” she said. “It was great to get involved.”
Brenon Burkhardt, a junior majoring in marketing and business education from Sparta, said the club usually cleans up the roadway twice a year. Due to COVID-19 and classes moving to alternative education methods in the spring, the club was unable to meet in the spring.
The group maintains the highway to help give back to the community, Burkhardt said.
While students were picking up trash, trucks honked their horns and drivers waved.
It is a normal reaction to the students cleaning up the highway, said Debbie Stanislawski, professor, program director and the association’s adviser.
“Adopt a Highway gives our Marketing and Business Education Association members a sense of being part of the community,” Stanislawski said. “Members gain a new sense of the worth of making good choices relative to not littering, and the conversation usually evolves into the potential of a research project that could be conducted on the types of items recovered along the roadside.
“For MBEA members this also gives them firsthand experience with a service project that they can replicate when they become K-12 marketing and business teachers with their future career and technical student organizations,” Stanislawski said.
The most unusual item students found was a bumper from a car. They notified the Adopt a Highway program to get it picked up because it was too large for the students to haul.
Joanna Lee, a sophomore majoring in marketing and business education from Turtle Lake, joined in the cleanup to give back to the community and meet those in her major.
“Getting to know people in you major is really important,” Lee said. “It makes you feel like you have a support system, and they also understand what you are going through.”
Lee decided to attend UW-Stout after taking a tour of the campus. “It felt like home,” she said. “I knew this is where I needed to be.”
Being part of the association allows students to network, meet business professionals and grow into their career, Burkhardt said.
Gavin Raph, a junior majoring in marketing and business education from Maple Grove, Minn., said he chose UW-Stout because the major was available. “It is cost effective, close to home and offers a good educational program,” he noted.
