Pine Barren Venom Jeep Club members after cleaning their Adopt-A-Highway (from Pine Barren Venom Jeep Club)
Steve Szabo and his wife, Erin, have always been avid users and enjoyers of the outdoors. Even before creating their jeep club, he and his wife “would always pick stuff up and leave the woods with more than we came in with because we thought it was the right thing to do,” Szabo said. Today, as the founder and president of Pine Barren Venom Jeep Club, Szabo is more motivated than ever to keep the Pine Barrens and South Jersey clean.
About the jeep club
The Pine Barren Venom Jeep Club is a New Jersey registered non-profit charity organization and a proud registered NJ Adopt-A-Highway member. As a non-profit organization, all of its clean-ups are done with the help of volunteers and donations from the community.
“It’s all volunteer work so we’re not getting paid for it,” Szabo said. “It’s all like-minded individuals with a common thought process to keep the areas we frequent clean and shiny.”
How a clean up works
It’s not as easy as going into the woods and picking up trash as it may seem.
“We apply for a special use permit through the forest and then we get some dumpsters, mostly donated, because we like to turn it into a whole community event,” Szabo explained.
“We would then meet with all of the volunteers from the community and get with the Forest Service and the NJ State Park Police to let us know where the ‘hot spots’ were, areas where people were dumping large quantities of trash,” he said. “We then go out with trailers, gloves, and pickers and grab as much trash as we can in a specific time frame to bring back to home base to be thrown in the dumpster.”
Areas of impact
While they have mainly worked in the Wharton State Forest part of the Pine Barrens, that is not the only place the jeep club has made efforts to clean.
“We have also cleaned Brendan T. Byrne State Forest (in the Pine Barrens) and we have worked with the township of Winslow to clean up streets that have had high litter concentrations,” Szabo said.
“We have even done Corson Inlet Beach, where we’ve done an event where we’d drive our jeeps out onto the beach and pick up trash there as well,” he said.
Their message
While the jeep club does its best to clean up South Jersey, the members know it is an uphill battle if more people are not educated on the uses of the forest.
“I want to make sure we are educating the people who are using the forest about the importance of bringing trash bags with you,” Szabo said. “Don’t throw your wrappers out the window and think to yourself, ‘Oh that’s just paper, it’s going to break down.’ Bring out whatever you bring in and try to pick up things you see whether it’s an empty bottle or whatever it is just do your part.”
Volunteering and donating
Interested in helping out? Go to Pine Barren Venom Jeep Club’s website for news on upcoming events, news, and contact information.