Waterbury’s Green Up Day collects 2.7 tons — and too many sofas
May 11, 2025 | By Lisa Scagliotti Note: See many photos from Green Up Day 2025 in Waterbury on the Scenes Around Town page.
Despite a soggy afternoon on Green Up Day, volunteers around Waterbury managed to clean up along every main street in town, easily filling more than 300 bags with trash. But large, dumped items pushed the overall haul to a new record level.
A Scout group Greens Up downtown. Photo by Gordon Miller
According to Casella, the Green Up trash container tipped the scales at 2.71 tons this year. That’s a jump from the typical collection that usually comes in just under 2 tons. Exceptions were Green Up in 2012 after Tropical Storm Irene and in 2022, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, which both exceeded two tons.
This year’s efforts saw many groups take part in the cleanup, including school students and local employees at multiple businesses and state offices.
Many individuals and groups also used the online signup in advance, which helped volunteers know what areas were already covered and which streets needed attention.
By Sunday afternoon, it was hard to find a stretch of any of our town's main roads with any litter left. There were also very few bags left along the streets as volunteers heeded the call to drop off filled bags at the town garage and Rodney's Transfer Station.
The full Green Up trash container at the town garage. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti
Behind the numbers
Unfortunately, a key factor in the heavier container weight this year was an uptick in illegal dumping ahead of and on Green Up Day. Multiple large, heavy household items were found along town roads and on town property near the Ice Center. Items dumped included seven sofas, a refrigerator, a broken boxspring and a mattress, three soggy, broken recliner chairs, a television, and a very large computer screen. The appliance and electronics needed special disposal, but the other items were included in the trash collection, adding to the overall weight.
The fee for disposing of Green Up trash is paid by the town of Waterbury. This year’s cost will likely be just under $700.
A Vermont tradition for more than 50 years, Green Up Day is meant to be a day for cleaning up litter along roadsides, streams and rivers, in parks and neighborhoods. It’s not meant to be a time for Vermonters to cast off household items, leaving them for their neighbors to collect and dispose of.
In reflecting on this added challenge this year, I recalled a letter the Roundabout published in 2022 from Duxbury Green Up volunteer Jill Smith, who coordinates clean up along her road. The headline was “Donate, don’t dump,” and the message is still very apropos.
Smith points out that there are low-cost and even free ways to get rid of household items including furniture and appliances. Since she wrote, Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore has opened in Waterbury. They accept furniture in good shape (meaning not having spent time outside in the snow, rain and mud), and they even can pick up.
Another reminder: electronics recycling is very convenient at the State of Vermont Surplus Property Warehouse on Rt. 2 in Waterbury. Some items are free by law to recycle; a small fee of 50 cents per pound applies to the rest. There’s even a company in Burlington called Sleep Well Recycling that accepts clean, used mattresses and boxsprings to deconstruct and recycle the materials. Here’s a Burlington Free Press story about that.
So, know that there are options to get rid of your unwanted stuff -- and please help pass that information along to friends and neighbors.
Meanwhile, it’s great to see that volunteers in Waterbury have gotten into the habit of collecting returnable bottles and cans separate from trash (thank you). About two dozen full bags were kept out of the landfill. Also, several dozen tires were both found and collected or turned in for recycling.
Green Up thanks
Know that a lot takes place behind the scenes to make Green Up happen smoothly. In addition to everyone out there picking up trash, many play a part before and afterward, so be sure to thank them, too:
Town clerks Karen Petrovic and Beth Jones who distribute bags;
Rodney Companion who hosts a collection site and distributes bags;
Waterbury Highway Department supervisor Celia Clark and crew for lending their garage and rounding up the dumped items;
Bill Minter (right) helps Owen Hall unload at the town garage. Photo by Gordon Miller
Town Manager Tom Leitz and the Waterbury Selectboard for including Green Up in the annual budget;
John Malter at the Mad River Resource Management Alliance who organizes the tire recycling collection, gets Green Up info out to the community, and then wrangles all of the household hazardous waste the following weekend;
Pack & Send Plus for keeping the Green Up banner up to date;
Shaw’s for supplying snacks (organized by Green Up Vermont, which provides those awesome bags and posters, and gets the word out).
There are also organizers in multiple workplaces and with groups in town who corralled folks to Green Up together, including at Ivy Computers, Darn Tough, KORE Power, Brookside Primary School, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and multiple state offices. The Green Mountain Roamers snowmobile club combined trail cleanup and lunch with Green Up along Little River Road and the VAST trails in the area. (They win best use of a Green Up bag as a rain jacket, too.)
Chuck Kletecka and Liz Schlegel unload some big items. Photo by Lisa Scagliotti
Here’s a shout-out to the volunteers who helped with unloading/tallying at the drop-off sites: Ian Shea and Doug Greason at Rodney's; Bill Minter, Anne Imhoff, Liz Schlegel, Don Schneider and Anna Brundage at the town garage. Also to Justine Myers who put up posters around town; Chuck Kletecka for scouting and collecting wayward bags, tires and piles that people couldn't move; and Shane Grace for taking the returnables to clean and redeem.
Finally, Green Up Day is always the first Saturday in May, which means the next one will be Saturday, May 2, 2026. Like all volunteer endeavors, there’s always a need for new people to get involved as others move on. Green Up is no exception. Anyone interested in helping with Green Up 2026 is encouraged to get in touch via email at lscagliotti@comcast.net.
The behind-the-scenes work starts in 10 months, soon after Town Meeting Day!
Lisa Scagliotti was Waterbury’s volunteer Green Up coordinator long before becoming editor at the Waterbury Roundabout.