More than 100 Shippensburg University students joined numerous Shippensburg residents on Saturday in picking up pieces of trash that ranged from golf balls to umbrellas across the town as part of Shippensburg’s annual Ship Shape Day.

The 20-year-old spring cleanup day is part of the community’s series of week-long events that are centered around caring for the environment. SU students, like the football and women’s soccer teams, come out every year at 8:30 a.m. to the Firefighter’s Activity Center on Orange Street to clean up the town.

“It’s a social interaction that you would not normally get,” said Bruce Hockersmith, mayor of Shippensburg Borough. “It gets people away from computers and video games to learn to achieve a common task together.”

The event is one of the great social events of Shippensburg, Hockersmith said. It gives people the chance to engage in the community, compete in the “Most Unique Item” contest and enjoy lunch together.

Dozens of groups split up with orange vests, gloves and trash bags to parks, schools, roadsides and tree lines to gather garbage. SU’s Red Raider football team split up into eight groups, ranging from Walmart to the Shippensburg Historical Society.

“They come out and see our football games, so we’ll come out and help the community,” said Will Hudson, an SU junior and member of the football team.

Hudson said that he has participated in Ship Shape Day with the team since he was a freshman.

“It’s our community too,” said team member Dywan Blanding, explaining that SU students are part of the borough’s community. “As much as we deserve to have it clean, the community does too.”

“We are one Ship,” said Victoria Kerr, director of SU’s Career and Community Engagement Center. “We are stewards of our community.”

One of the ways for people to be stewards was to recycle their unwanted electronics at the event instead of throwing them into the garbage. Jay Edwards, of Jay’s Computer Repair on King Street, stood by with a couple of pickup trucks to load up old speakers, computers, TVs and record players. He said he can no longer take tube TVs or radios because the only local electronic recycling center, Dauphin County Recycling Center, has reached capacity.

“It made it really hard to get rid of the stuff,” Edwards said, explaining the center is limited in what it can accept. If Shippensburg residents try to recycle or throw away tube technology, the borough has to find a place to store it, Hockersmith said. Edwards is working with the borough to find a way they can draw in a third party to resolve the issue, but there has been no success as of yet, Edwards said.

Every few minutes, another recycler stopped in at the fire hall to hand over another piece of aging technology. The community collected dozens of bags of trash and other objects and Edwards received numerous electronical devices.

Hockersmith said he was confident the event would have a positive impact on Shippensburg — “We will have a cleaner community.”

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