For the past five years, Kelly McDowell and a group of volunteers have been spending their weekends cleaning up trash on the Route 1 Bypass, from Kennett Square to Jennersville, writes Fran Maye for the Daily Local News.

Last weekend, they collected 68 bags of trash, and they are planning to increase that number this weekend.

“If I don’t clean it up, it’s not getting done,” said McDowell. “It will just sit there along the road and pile up and pile up, and no one will care.”

McDowell recently moved to Lancaster County, but she does not plan on stopping her trash-cleaning efforts that run from the start of March to the end of May.

“I love Chester County,” she said, “even though I don’t live there and I didn’t put the trash on the roads.”

Last week, most of the trash she and her team found along Route 1 was masks, beer bottles, plastic bags, and cans.

“We have the power to make where we live a better place,” she said. “We only have one planet, and it shouldn’t be covered in plastic.”

Read more about Kelly McDowell’s mission in the Daily Local News here.