Trees newly planted near the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, a mayoral sweep of Mount Washington today, a Wednesday inspection of the airport corridor by the county executive -- those are just warm-ups for a big September spruce-up of the region, including a Sept. 12 blitz aimed at spit-shining key roads and neighborhoods before the G-20 summit.

Officials from Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and a half dozen agencies have been coordinating efforts since last month, and volunteer litter fighters have been mapping out their push even longer. Along the way, they've decided to look beyond the Sept. 24 and 25 summit of global leaders, hoping to use it as a catalyst to bolster databases of cleanup volunteers and deepen cooperation among agencies.

City Neighborhood Initiatives Director Kim Graziani called the summit "an opportunity to just mobilize people who are passionate about cleaning up."

Needed now: more volunteers.

"Let the city and the county and the White House worry about the big ideas," said Boris Weinstein, chair of the volunteer Clean Pittsburgh Commission. "All we're worried about is making Pittsburgh shine."

City and county government are already at work.

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is leading a series of "sweeps," including one July 23 around the convention center, and one today on Mount Washington. There, he's already put in new trash cans, and the Mount Washington Community Development Corp. has asked to have new streetlights installed, rickety fences fixed, and security cameras posted along Grandview Avenue.

The city's Redd-Up Campaign crew has shifted from daylight to nights, so it can work unimpeded by traffic. Its focus is now Downtown, Mount Washington, Oakland, the Strip District and the South Side -- viewed by city leaders as the neighborhoods most likely to be visited by the hundreds of international government staff and thousands of journalists expected to attend the summit.

County Executive Dan Onorato will conduct a "Clean Up & Beautification Tour" along the airport corridor Wednesday. He'll also introduce welcoming signs that businesses can use as the world passes through.

County officials are focusing on cleaning traffic corridors from Pittsburgh International Airport and the Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin, said Pat Siger of the YMCA of Greater Pittsburgh, who is coordinating much of the county's role in the cleanup. The cleanup, which will mostly include picking up trash and mowing green patches, will be focused along the Parkway West from the airport into Downtown, and around Lebanon Church Road, state Route 885, Mifflin Road and state Route 837 from the county airport to town.

"Nobody has told us what routes the delegations will be using, but we're just making sure that we clean all the possible routes they may end up using," said Ms. Siger.

The city and county can't do it alone.

When Mr. Weinstein -- whose joint Shadyside and Homewood cleanups built over six years into a citywide network -- heard in late May that leaders of the world's biggest economies would be coming to Pittsburgh, he started planning.

He wants to put 1,700 volunteers on the city and suburban streets on Sept. 12 with trash bags, gloves, and merciless eyes for litter. He is joined by Bob McKinley, executive director of Allegheny CleanWays, whose focus will be on areas near the airports and on the way Downtown.

On Friday, the two met with city, county and PennDOT officials to set up a timeline. Going out pronto are letters to longtime neighborhood cleanup organizers, telling them to prepare Sept. 12 blitzes in their areas.

In Oakland, for instance, the job of marshalling an estimated 100 volunteers falls to Kelly Wawrzeniak, community organizer for the Oakland Planning and Development Corp. She'll try to guess the streets that summit-goers will use to get to Oakland hotels and to Phipps Conservatory, the scene of a Sept. 24 welcoming session. She'll use the excitement about the G-20, plus the promise of pizza, to bolster her student-dominated volunteer pool.

"You'd be surprised what you can do with college students when motivated with pizza," said Luci-Jo DiMaggio, a campus minister at Duquesne University. Along with the student group Evergreen, she runs monthly cleanups in Uptown, and is gearing their September effort toward the Fifth-and-Forbes corridor from Oakland to Downtown, plus its side streets.

The region's cleanup veterans need rookies ready to report on Sept. 12 to target neighborhoods and roadway base camps, and do anything from picking up bottles, to passing out bags and water.

Within two weeks, Mr. Weinstein and Mr. McKinley plan to have e-mails, calls or letters out to 400 people who have gone to the Web site www.pittsburghg20.org and indicated that they'd like to help.

They need more people to go to that site, click on "Be a volunteer," and fill in the box under "cleaning and beautification." They're also reaching out to businesses, adopt-a-highway groups, Kiwanis Clubs, and others.

The city and county are talking with local media about a public service campaign to make Sept. 4 to Sept. 24 cleanup time, and to drum up volunteers for Sept. 12.

"I think the key is, everyone has a role," said Ms. Graziani. If you can't be part of a formal litter patrol, clean up your street or the roads you traverse, she said.

The themes of the push are still emerging.

"How do we get to the young folks, the folks that have a pride in the city, the Steelers or Penguins fans?" Mr. McKinley said. He's brainstormed ways to channel sports spirit into a cleanup blitz. "We want to tackle litter. We want to score a goal against litter."

At a meeting July 27, the city, county, and numerous agencies met and agreed to team up to make sure visitors see clean vistas from arrival to departure.

At Pittsburgh International Airport, crews will be sprucing up and painting concourses and other public areas in advance of the summit. They've already started in the baggage-claim area, said Stephanie Saracco, chief operating officer.

"We are the first look a lot of people get of Pittsburgh and we want it to be the best," she said.

Crews also will be paying attention to the airport's main entrance and to landscaping throughout the complex.

"We want to make sure that all of the major routes going into the city look good, that the roads shine leading into the Downtown area," said PennDOT spokesman Jim Struzzi. His state agency's work will focus on litter removal and sprucing up the landscaping, but it also is likely that construction will be curtailed during the summit, he said.

Port Authority spokesman Jim Ritchie said his county-related agency will concentrate on the three busways and Light Rail Transit lines. Stations will be cleaned and graffiti removed from authority property.

Not on the sandblast list is the graffiti along the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway. Most of that is on a concrete wall owned by Norfolk Southern Railway, whose tracks run parallel to the busway.

The convention center, where the summit is to be held, will get a complete scrubbing.

That not only applies to the windows, which will get a washing, but the entire exterior, said Mark Leahy, general manager. "Everything gets an extra buff for the G-20, that's for sure."

Crews also will be painting and cleaning inside. Local foundations are spearheading an effort to spruce the landscaping outside the center.

Officials also are paying close attention to back-of-the-house areas, figuring that some of the delegates might want to take a look of the center's green features. It's like "you're having company over and showing them your closet," Mr. Leahy said.

The Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority is painting fire hydrants. The Urban Redevelopment Authority is urging businesses that use its Main Streets programs to tidy up.

More challenging are situations in which the problems sit on private property. Example: The graffiti tags and weeds on the Norfolk Southern trestles near the convention center. Norfolk Southern and the city are talking about sharing the burden of cleaning it up, with the railroad possibly providing the paint and city crews doing the painting.

The city also plans to contact owners of graffiti-plagued property near the convention center, such as some of the vacant storefronts in the 1200 block of Penn Avenue, and to ask them to sign forms allowing the city to blast the vandalism away. Removal may wait until the week before the summit, so vandals have less time to replace their tags.

Officials hope the act of having a regional cleanup will discourage people from messing things up again, said Mr. McKinley. "My dream, my hope, my goal is that we instill a higher level of pride in our communities."