To the editor:
While thousands of people celebrated Lee’s most extensive Founders Weekend ever (September 19–21), a largely behind-the-scenes, collaborative effort minimized waste once again. Our success was due to the efforts of almost 50 volunteers (each of whom received a cloth shopping bag handmade by Lee resident Trish Ross), extensive promotion by the Lee Chamber of Commerce, the cooperation of many food vendors, and the invaluable free service from Casella Waste Systems, which provided over a dozen toters and processing of the trash and recyclables, and from Meadow Farms, which stationed a roll-off dumpster downtown all weekend and processed all the compostables.
Overall, almost 94 percent of attendee waste was diverted to composting and recycling. The significant increase in compostables was remarkable, amounting to an estimated 200 cubic feet, a 50 percent increase over the 2024 total! And we educated some people in the process. Although the Chamber asked vendors to not dispose of their waste in town, some did, bringing the total diversion down to 88 percent.
Our Founders Weekend zero-waste effort is our most intensive activity of the year. We started recruiting volunteers in March. Logistical planning took countless hours, as it was made more complicated by the addition of new stations and Sunday activities, as well as the loss of our downtown storage area due to the pending construction of Lee’s new public safety building. In that regard, the First Congregational Church UCC in Lee provided crucial support by letting us use its community room to assemble and store our zero-waste stations before the event kicked off.
What drives our committee’s commitment to reduce waste is our realization that Massachusetts must send some of its trash out of state for processing and that food waste that ends up in landfills produces climate-warming methane, which is initially far more harmful than carbon dioxide. We are doing this to help preserve a healthy environment for ourselves and future generations. Recycling and composting as much as we can is a positive step we all can take.
From what we have heard, Lee is unusual, if not unique, among Berkshire County municipalities in striving to minimize waste at major events. We have learned a lot over the past dozen years and would be pleased to help others do the same.
Peter Hofman
Chair of the Lee Greener Gateway Committee
Lee
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