What do plates,💩, and pickleballs all have in common? They’re all things we found in the trash at our downtown JP waste audit! On a chilly November day, Clean Water Action’s Zero Waste Organizer, Amber Schmidt, joined forces with volunteers from JP ZeroWaste to open the waste bins along Centre Street between Pond Street and Custer Street in Jamaica Plain and see what gets thrown away in a 24-hour period. It was gross. It was hilarious. And we did it for the data!
The waste audit is step one of a larger plan. We’re collaborating with JP ZeroWaste, the City of Boston, Beyond Plastics Greater Boston, and Recirclable to reduce the amount of trash sent to landfills and incinerators or trucked to other states. Our team received a Reduce, Reuse, Repair Microgrant from the Massachusetts DEP to implement changes in downtown Jamaica Plain.
For the audit, we opened the bins and sorted over 300 pounds of trash into categories from food waste to plastics to dog poop and weighed each group separately. (There really were more pickleballs than you would expect.) This gives us a trash baseline.
The next step is helping businesses implement proven strategies to reduce the amount of trash generated. First, we’re encouraging restaurants to “Skip the Stuff” by not automatically tossing napkins, plastic utensils, and condiment packs into every to-go order. We’re also working on helping businesses acquire reusable dishware for dining-in as well as a dishwashing system that works for them through our ReThink Disposable program. And we’re partnering with Recirclable to encourage businesses to join a local reusable to-go container program, so customers can check out and return containers from all of their favorite downtown eateries like library books.
Then, next summer, we will open the trash bins once again to see what’s inside! Can we reduce the amount of trash created by one downtown? We can. And we're going to prove it!
Learn more about Clean Water Action’s ReThink Disposable campaign here!
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