Inaugural townwide cleanup day a big success

Darnell Bell, Teressa Jones, and Patricia and Steve Cohen take part in the inaugural Canton Cleanup. (Cynthia Rosina photos)

In an impressive display of community unity and civic pride, more than 260 local residents, ranging from preschoolers to high school athletes to senior citizens, fanned out across Canton on Saturday morning to collect litter and debris as part of the first ever townwide cleanup event.

Dubbed the “Great Canton Cleanup,” the event proved to be a smashing success as volunteers combined to collect approximately 80 large bags of trash — two-and-a-half dump trucks worth — within a span of just two hours.

“It was a great success,” said Jeff Sullivan, who spearheaded this year’s cleanup after launching a Canton chapter of Keep Massachusetts Beautiful, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to beautifying the landscape.

For the inaugural event, Sullivan wanted to focus on large public spaces such as school grounds, the downtown area, and Messinger and Devoll fields — locations that residents are familiar with and that are also heavily trafficked (and heavily littered). Working with local officials and members of the town’s Beautification, Sustainability, and Walk, Bike & Hike committees, they ended up with 13 designated cleanup sites, each with its own site leader and small army of eager volunteers.

Sullivan himself led the team at Messinger Park/Bailey Street/Old Shepard Pond and he was fortunate enough to witness the transformation of that area firsthand.

While there was plenty to collect and remove within the designated sites, Sullivan said the cleanup efforts inevitably spread to adjacent areas, which then spilled over into “additional parks and railroad stations, railroad tracks, waterways, wetlands and conservation areas.”

What was particularly impressive to Sullivan was the “tenacity” shown by many of the Canton volunteers as they worked their way into heavily wooded areas, pressing on through thick brush and in some instances wading through the muck to remove items such as car tires, construction debris, and even pieces of an old dock.

“The feedback that I got from the site leaders was that people were ambitious and they were determined, and nothing was left unturned,” said Sullivan. “With the high school kids, for instance, I think it was a big motivator for them to clean up their campus, and while I had walked the site just a few days earlier with [CPS Facilities Director] Brian Lynch and it was generally very clean, these kids were going into the woods and into some of these wetlands behind the athletic fields, and they ended up pulling 17 tires out from under the bushes.”

“The football team alone had 20 players out there helping with the cleanup, and these guys were incredible,” he said. “They were absolute warriors.”

After the two-hour cleanup period, all registered volunteers were invited back to Memorial Field on the CHS campus for a post-event cookout hosted by the Canton Town Club. Of the 265 who volunteered for the cleanup itself, Sullivan estimated that around 125 to 150 made their way to the cookout, where they were greeted and served by members of the Canton Select Board. All five board members were in attendance, along with several other town officials and Canton school leaders. “It was definitely a ‘star-studded’ event,” said Sullivan.

While there were certainly some lessons learned and at least a few things that he would do differently the next time around, Sullivan said he was thrilled with the results of the inaugural cleanup and thoroughly impressed by the response it received in year one. And there were so many champions — from the football players and local scout troops to the volunteers who came out wearing waders so they could access heavier debris in the waterways, to people like Brian Loughran of the DPW, who did double duty as both a site leader and later as a trash hauler.

Sullivan is also grateful for the encouragement and assistance he received from the aforementioned committees and from people like Lisa Lopez, Debbie Stein-Sharpe, Alan Rapoport, and Judy Lehrer Jacobs from the Friends of the Blue Hills, along with many others.

Sullivan said he definitely wants to see the “Great Canton Cleanup” become an annual spring tradition and would like to focus more on individual neighborhoods in the future. In the meantime, he is already hard at work on a few other local initiatives that he believes will help to make Canton a “cleaner, greener place to live, work and play.” One is focused on Bolivar Pond — a largely neglected water body that was once a recreational hub — and another concerns the development of a community recreational path spanning several miles across town. Both projects are multi-year efforts and he is only in the beginning stages, but he is certainly feeling optimistic after the success of the cleanup and promises that there will be much more to come on both efforts in the months ahead.

Sullivan said if there is one thing that Saturday’s event reinforced for him, it’s that Canton residents truly do love their town and they care about one another.

“I really think the town should do more events like this,” he said. “And with COVID now hopefully in the rearview mirror, we have a great opportunity to really improve our town and to get out and meet some new neighbors. When I was planning the cleanup, a friend of mine who’s involved in the town said even if one piece of trash is picked up then it’s worthwhile, but the fact that we had the response we did after just a few months of planning — and to have it on one of the busiest days of the spring — that really says something about this town and the people who live here.”

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