The Springfield Quad hosted an Earth Day celebration on April 22
The weather couldn’t have been better for an Earth Day festival at Springfield’s downtown Quad yesterday afternoon. Several booths were set up in the shining midday sun on the green lawn, and a large tent on the plaza at the back of the central library branch offered some shade for the free ice cream doled out all day courtesy of Friendly’s. The only drawback to the setting was that the leafless trees couldn’t do the same.
ReStore director John Majercak at the CET booth
John Majercak, director of the ReStore, was there manning a booth for both the store as well as for the Center for Ecological Technology, its parent non-profit. Majercak told me he’s an Ohio native who lived in the Boston area for a while, and happily relocated to Franklin County 15 years ago for the great western Massachusetts quality of life. He lamented our overdependence on the car for getting around, though.
Mary Ayala with some of her displays of positive city news (click image for more)
Realtor Mary Ayala was there alongside fellow city residents Linda Langevin and Charles Contant to give a boost to the Keep Springfield Beautiful campaign. Ayala had on display three large poster boards showing off the positive press Springfield has received in the Republican over the past year. She told me that she thinks there’s a lot more positive news that never made it to the paper.
She was hopeful that coverage of last Saturday’s event—during which Keep Springfield Beautiful was made an official affiliate of Keep America Beautiful—will get some press in Wednesday’s neighborhoods section of the paper.
Charles Contant and Linda Langevin with official Keep Springfield Beautiful certification
Langevin and Contant had the official certificate proudly on display at their table.
Also on display was an informative city map showing cleanup sites for Saturday’s massive citywide effort. More details on that to come, in a separate post, for reference.
KSB’s working map of cleanup sites and strategy (click for larger view)
Ed Casey explains how to care for a blue spruce sapling—it likes sun
City forester Ed Casey was on hand to distribute baby spruce trees, and DPW employee Greg Superneau manned a table giving away miniature blue recycling bins (the 96-gallon, automated kind). I grilled Superneau for a moment to ask how residents could get their hands on the life-sized bins of this type—residents interested in recycling more than they throw away, for example.
Greg Superneau with his miniature blue recycling bin collection for giveaway
Superneau told me that residents simply must prove (by calling and providing a persuasive case) that they can process that much of one "stream" of recyclables. Springfield recycles in two streams: paper products in one, and metal, glass and plastic in another. He said that typically day care centers and multi-family homes, for instance, can prove an ability to recycle this much material. The bins need to be full every two weeks, he said, for automation to be justified and worth the cost and extra time it takes. All recycling bins are free; if your bins are overfull every two weeks, you can always get more of the smaller bins. I asked Superneau what the miniature bins were good for. He suggested using it to recycle bottle tops, and then just wheel it out to your curb.
The Boys of the Landfill offer some cool bluegrass sounds to counter the hot April sun
Also on hand was the Shutesbury-based Boys of the Landfill, a bluegrass band, providing a pleasant diversion from the heat when it grew uncomfortable. They played one song and then said, "If you’re sick of us already, you can go inside and catch Tom Ricardi presenting birds of prey." (I never get bored of Ricardi’s presentation and his amazing cohorts—having seen the presentation multitudes of times, it’s always entertaining and informative, and the birds are such characters.)
Juanita Martinez of ECOS (Environmental Change for Our Schools) had an information table set up to demonstrate paper-making for kids. The process is amazingly easy.
Juanita Martinez prepares paper scraps and water to make pulp
She used a blender to mix a few paper scraps with a lot of water, which she dumped into a large tub with a few grass clippings and flower petals. Sometimes she adds glitter, too.
Using a screen you can buy at Michael’s, she plunged her hands into the water and picked up some pulp. At home, you can just lay this out directly to dry. For her purposes, she had to transfer the pulp onto some newspaper to dry so she could reuse the screen for all the kids she had coming to try it out.
Martinez helps a child sponge off extra moisture before laying the paper out to dry
Solar energy materials were also on display. Kosmo Solar showed how you can transform your conventional home into one that draws on solar power and can actually earn you credits with your power company as you begin to feed energy back to the grid. This is one of the most practical ideas around and is soon going to find itself attached to my new home.
Also available were some very shiny and hot reflector ovens. One I examined closely was roasting peanuts at nearly 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
A group from the High School of Science and Technology had a booth set up promoting their Envirothon competition effort, focusing on researching renewable energy sources, such as the fast-growing perennial switchgrass.
The Connecticut River Watershed Council had a booth to demonstrate the effects of pollution on our natural water supply. Kids were fascinated by this one as they observed dirt traveling through lots of channels in a miniature ecosystem of sorts.
The Western Massachusetts Electric Company was giving away energy-efficient light bulbs as well as toy bulbs of this sort, made of foam.
Topping off this great event was the free bottled tap water available from the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission. My children were a little confused at first as to whether it was bottled sewer water, which made for some funny jokes for a while, but in all seriousness it is the best drinking water anywhere.
