![]() Would-be selectmen campaign there at election time. Some 3,000 cars move in and out of the center on an average Saturday, a fact not lost on Girl Scouts, come cookie-selling time. At least one going-away party has been held there for a departing resident, because the dump ``epitomizes Wellesley'' as much as anything. Townsfolk regularly bring visitors on a tour of the place. ``We've seen deer, fox, raccoons, skunk, a red-tailed hawk, geese, and pheasants, even a killdeer,'' says Barry. ![]() It's also something of a haven for wildlife. Lady-slippers bloom in season, and people gather mushrooms and dandelion greens in the spring. The surrounding area is landscaped and parklike. What these visitors find is something quite remarkable for a solid-waste treatment operation. In the words of Barbara Mudd, director of a recycling group from nearby Concord, Mass.: ``It's the prototype of what we are trying to become.''Īs landfill options diminish and America's solid-waste crisis grows, Wellesley's effective program has drawn increasing numbers of visitors from around the country, along with overseas contingents from Britain, Israel, Argentina, and Japan. The town was ahead of the times, a fact that enabled it to become a model that many now follow. When landfill was the preferred, if not the only, way to treat solid waste in this country, Wellesley converted the site around its defunct incinerator into a ``Municipal Recycling and Disposal Facility'' - its official title. Wellesley, a wealthy town of largely college-educated professionals on the outskirts of Boston, has been recycling since 1971. If, in fact, ``the dump'' had been only the landfill the term implies, the bonds would have been buried under tons of other waste and capped with soil long before their loss was noticed. Barry tells the tale to illustrate some of the unexpected bonuses that disciplined recycling has for this community. ![]() She had inadvertently thrown away $8,700 of negotiable bonds. The woman who answered the door was horrified when shown the contents. He drove across town to deliver a set of small desktop drawers to an address he'd found inside. In the meantime, you might see the RDF step up promotions of alternate places to donate goods, or even align with efforts such as Wellesley Rotary’s Repair Cafe.Two years ago George Barry, manager of this town's ``dump,'' left work early. “Our fear is that if we were to reopen that area as it was before we should expect to have sort of similar results as before, and I don’t think that is good enough,” he said. The DPW has put a draft job description together for someone who would manage the area on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, Cohen said. One challenge, aside from the obvious COVID-19 social distancing ones within a space that can become a feeding frenzy, is that volunteers are dramatically reduced. The area has closed in early December in recent years, so we still have a few months to play with. Sustainable Wellesley distributed a list in July of places accepting donations.īut according to DPW Director Dave Cohen, you might not want to give up on the RDF Reusables area opening in some format by the end of the year. Some in Wellesley have turned to online groups like Wellesley Give & Take or joined forces to make runs to Savers in Framingham. “I know that’s probably happening across town.” “I have stuff that’s piling up in my basement that I would prefer to be repurposed and reused by other people but at some point if I run out of space I have a hard decision about how I get rid of it,” Jeff Wechsler, a member of the Wellesley Board of Public Works, said during the board’s meeting this week. ![]() With no Recycling & Disposal Facility give-and-take area so far this year, residents are finding their basements, garages, and other parts of their homes overflowing with stuff they’d like to get rid of in a responsible way. Wellesley has been spring cleaning all summer long. ![]()
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