Medfield Girl Scout Junior Troop Encourages Residents to Increase Recycling

What better time than the month of March – Saint Patrick’s Day and the beginning of Spring – for Junior Girl Scouts (in their green uniforms) to “go green” and pledge to increase the town's recycling efforts.

Medfield Girl Scout Junior Troop 74870 is working toward their Bronze Award, the highest award attainable by a Junior Girl Scout, and they have created a public service campaign to raise awareness.

“It is our mission to spread the word that it doesn’t cost anything to recycle,” said troop leader Maureen Stewart. “We could save the Medfield taxpayers money and clean up our town. It is a win-win for everyone.”

The scouts have created posters and bookmarks that they hope to place in businesses and public places around town, including the town’s transfer station.

Clever slogans and catch phrases, as well as variations of the standard three-sided recycle triangle (representing reduce, reuse, recycle) adorn the scout’s materials such as “Get Off the Couch and Recycle,” “Go Green…Be A Recycling Machine,” “Help!,” and, quite simply, “Recycle.”  

Maddie Coogan’s message is “Don’t Trash Our Future.”  

Coogan’s poster, which she hopes to hang in the town library or at the transfer station, says recycling saves resources, conserves energy, reduces greenhouse gases, saves money, means jobs, and includes these facts:

• Massachusetts recycled enough paper last year to prevent the cutting of 17 million trees.
• Recycling helps Massachusetts residents reduce greenhouse gases by the equivalent of 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is like taking 1.6 million cars off the road a year.
• Last year, recycling in Massachusetts saved over 85 trillion BTUs of energy, which is enough to power 820,000 homes for one year.
• Massachusetts throws away 1.5 tons of paper every year, and if just half of that was recycled, the stat would save nearly $52 million in disposal costs.
• Recycling is a source of jobs in Massachusetts where 14,000 people are employed at 2,000 recycling businesses and organizations. They have an annual payroll of $5 million and produce $3.2 billion in sales receipts.

Scout Jules Giurani said, “Recycling is good for the environment; if we recycle more paper, then we won’t have to be cutting down more trees.”

Her poster reads, “Recycling: Good for the environment, good for Medfield, good for you.”

The scouts need to put 20 hours into their project. 

During the course of the project, they including selectman Ann Thompson to find out what needs the town has to be filled, and asked about recycling. They met with Electronix Redux, a Norfolk company that collects electronic waste at the Medfield Transfer Station once a month.     

The girls also worked with Electronix Redux to recycle two laptop computers (donated by two troop members) to erase all personal information and data from the computers and then donated them to the to be given to students in need.

Troop 74870 also met with Town Administrator Michael Sullivan, where the girls learned about the cost of recycling. 

Sullivan, who shared interesting statistics with the scouts such as:

• Last year, 78.7 percent (3,207.24 tons) of Medfield’s trash was hauled away and incinerated while only 21.3 percent (870.42 tons) was recycled. 
• It costs taxpayers approximately $100 a ton to haul away trash to an incinerator, but only $27 a ton to haul recyclables to a sorting facility.

“It costs almost 75 percent more to haul away the trash we throw in the garbage,” said Stewart, recapping facts learned by the girls along the road to the Bronze Award. “We know that many people are not recycling because we have seen it at the station, the employee at the station have said they see it, and, by observing our own habits at home, we know that more than 25 percent of our household trash can be recycled.”

If the town were able to see an increase in recycling and a corresponding decrease in its hauling bills, the Girl Scouts suggest any savings could be put toward – in their words – raises for police, raises for teachers, new sidewalks, “and a raise for the firefighters, they haven’t had a raise in three years.”