Hurricane Matthew will likely leave a bit of a mess in its wake, making next week’s City of Clinton Fall Clean Up Week even more fitting.

The Public Works and Utilities Department has offered a friendly reminder for residents to start collecting their unwanted items. During the cleanup weeks, regular rules are suspended and additional items, including furniture, appliances, four tires per household and tree limbs cut to a certain length, are collected.

This year, Fall Clean Up Week will be held Oct. 10-14. Trash needs to be curbside at 7 a.m. on their regular trash day. Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day will be held at the tail end of the week, on Saturday, Oct. 15. It will extend from 9 a.m. to noon at the City Market at 215 Lisbon St.

While the biannual clean up weeks — one is also held in the spring — expand what can be collected by Public Works crews and allow residents to clean up their neighborhoods, oil-based paints, batteries, insecticides, auto parts, gasoline and other substances still cannot be collected because they pose safety hazards for city crews and cannot be processed at the landfill.

However, some of those hazardous items can be accepted on the following Saturday with the return of Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day. Some of the items collected include oil-based paints, paint thinners, drain cleaners, solvents, old gasoline, rechargeable batteries, fluorescent light bulbs, antifreeze and aerosol paints.

Electronics, fireworks and explosives, agricultural waste, ammunition, batteries and other items still cannot be collected.

Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day took a hiatus last year. A partnership between Clinton Public Works, Sampson County and the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the event started in 2013 to discard such hazardous items.

“Just about everything from household paint to cleaners to insecticides and pesticides (are accepted),” Public Works director Jeff Vreugdenhil said. “Anything that is a household hazardous waste item, you can bring it to the City Market that Saturday morning up until lunch time and save the processing.”

After little participation in 2014, however, the city decided to take a break for 2015.

“We did not do it last year because the preceding year we had done it two years in a row and there wasn’t near as much participation (in 2014). There was some, but our first year was really good, so we think a year lapse will be key to give people a chance to accumulate some thing,” Vreugdenhil stated. “We will be glad to handle those in a professional manner. We would like to encourage people to participate.”

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Hazardous waste collection returns

By Chris Berendt

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Reach Managing Editor Chris Berendt at 910-249-4616. Follow the paper on twitter @SampsonInd and like us on Facebook.