Look around at our schools, playgrounds, and ball fields and you’ll see the standard green toters for trash paired with new bright blue toters for all recycling (picture, right).  In the left picture, taken at the playground at the Cochituate Ball Field, note Pat Conaway’s Buddy Bin for recycled bottles and aluminium cans.  For the past several years, every week, former middle school teacher Conaway traveled around Wayland, sometimes with volunteers, to empty these “buddy bins” into his trailer which was then driven to the Wayland transfer station.  Now, thanks to the efforts by the Green Team, the Board of Public Works, and by the Recreation Commission, every trash toter is now paired with a recycling bin that will be emptied weekly.  A happy Pat Conaway says “no community comes close to Natick and now Wayland in terms of outdoor recycling at parks, fields, downtown areas.  Wellesley has some outstanding green initiatives, but it's fairly backward on outdoor recycling.  If you drive through the center of the town: lots of expensive black steel trash barrels, not one recycling container.  A town official claims that people in Wellesley ‘carry in and carry out.’  The people in Wellesley are not that different than the folks in Wayland, Natick, and Framingham..….A few weeks ago I counted 70 trash barrels on Boston Common, and not one recycle bin.”

 

The Green Team hopes that all baseball, soccer, softball, crew, football, track, cheerleading, and lacrosse coaches will direct students and parents to use the new blue recycling toters.  Even better: bring reusable water bottles to the fields that can be refilled at the fountains or at home. Learn more at http://www.waylandgreenteam.org

 

NOTE: Now that Wayland has adopted single-stream recycling, cardboard and (news)papers can be added to the plastic, aluminium and glass in the new blue toters.

 

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