Staff Writer
GREENFIELD — As a part of Connecticut River Conservancy’s Source to Sea Cleanup, dozens of volunteers teamed up to bag tons of garbage along the Green River on Saturday.
Beginning at the Green River Swimming and Recreation Area, volunteers geared up with garden gloves and repurposed plastic bags that would act as trash bags. In small groups, they fanned out to a number of sites along the Green River.
Many of the volunteers cited their relationships with the Green River as reasons to why they came: they wanted to keep it clean. For numerous volunteers, Saturday’s cleanup is an event not to be missed.
“Once you help [here], you put it on your calendar every year,” said Rick Roy, of Greenfield, at his seventh year of volunteering.
Greenfield’s cleanup sites were organized by David Boles, and Beth Bazler coordinated the volunteer crews going to sites in Gil and Montague.
Trash pulled from the Greenfield area would be piled at the recreation area, where it would be sorted and later disposed of by the Greenfield DPW, Bazler said. Trash from Montague and Gil would be bagged at each site, picked up by volunteers and brought to the transfer station to be sorted, Bazler said.
Both Bazler and Boles, as well as many others, spent hours visiting and documenting potential sites before Saturday’s event, Bazler said.
One of these sites was the gully behind Pat and Betsy McGreevy’s house. An uninhabited and deteriorating house, dating back to the 1920s, had collapsed into the gully, Pat McGreevy said.
The gully is a natural drain for rainwater and runoff to on its way to the river, McGreevy said.
For this year’s cleanup, a team from PV Squared Solar dismantled the house, carrying graffitied boards from the house to a truck, which would bring the pieces onto their next step of disposal.
The team brought a bunch of tools to help them break down the house, said Craig Lakas, a solar installer for PV Squared.
Anna Mannello, who works in marketing for the company, had previously gone to the site and shared pictures through a company email, which lead to discussion on how to tackle the project, Mannello said.
“This year is definitely bigger” than other Green River clean-up projects the company has done in the past, Mannello said.
Lakas pointed out that due to the possibility the house had lead paint—which has likely already leeched into the ground, he said—the team wore masks as a precaution.
The house is one example of how the Source to Sea Cleanup aims to remove pollution from the river’s ecosystem—not just the water, but from its banks and water sources that bring pollution to the river.
Removing pollution from rivers is important because clean rivers can reduce the impact of climate change, said Angela Chaffee, the communications director for the Connecticut River Conservancy.
Chaffee cited a 2019 study published by a team of England’s Cardiff University and the University of Vermont showed that reducing river pollution can help reduce the negative impacts of climate change on rivers.
Scientists continue to study how climate change impacts rivers and how to identify those impacts. Because of that, Saturday’s volunteers were likely not able to concretely identify how climate change affects the Green River, said Chaffee.
What is currently known about how climate change affects rivers relates to flooding, Chaffee said: Changes in climate are causing more frequent storms that cause flooding, and both the storms and flooding are more intense.
“On average, we remove 45 to 50 tons of trash across four states,” during the Source to Sea Cleanup, Chaffee said. “After tropical storm Irene, we had double that. That’s an example of how flooding is flushing all sorts of [trash] into our rivers.”
For Meg Baker, the secretary of the Historical Society of Greenfield, the cleanup is also a mini-lesson in history and culture.
“You can tell a lot about a culture by what they throw away,” Baker said, adding that the “range of items that [are] pulled from the river, it’s also a historical record” of the river.
In past years, Baker has found shards of pottery from the 1800s in the river. Examining the non-recyclable items, Baker commented on how today’s objects are temporary, in the eyes of history.
“Working in a museum, I am continually impressed by the durability of the past,” Baker said, citing objects made of metal, glass and wood that are still in good condition.
“Plastic degrades slowly, but it does degrade,” Baker said.
Plastic objects degrade into microplastics, which can be found in remote places in the world, said Andrew Fisk, the executive director of the Connecticut River Conservancy.
Fisk, who holds a Ph.D. in environmental sciences, explained that microplastics are hard to remove from the environment, in part due to how ubiquitous they are.
Saturday’s cleanup removes larger objects before they can further break down, Fisk said.
Stacey Lennard works as the events and projects coordinator for the Connecticut River Conservancy and organized the Source to Sea Cleanup
“Most people are thinking about recycling,” Lennard said, from the famous “reduce, reuse and recycle” motto. She looked out at the piles and piles of garbage, ranging in size from nip bottles to flat screen TVs and tires.
She said that the event is a way to clean up but to also emphasize the “reduce” in “reduce, reuse and recycle.”
Maureen O’Reilly can be reached at 413-772-0261, ext. 280 or moreilly@recorder.com