By Kristen Levine
A thirty five year-resident of Sterling, Laura Ricci doesn’t take litter on the town roads lightly. Armed
with a wheelbarrow, tools, and bright trash yellow bags provided by the Sterling Department of
Transportation and Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation, Ricci cleans up
garbage left to the wayside.
“I was tired of seeing garbage,” Ricci says of her original motivations. “I’d go for walks around
Sterling, see trash here, there, everywhere. I started in 2018…it’s just something I started doing. It
takes a long time to do it; sometimes [cleanup] takes days, sometimes seven hours cleaning different
parts of the road. It takes me an hour to fill up one of those yellow bags.”
A majority of what Ricci cleans up are aluminum cans; her cleanup routine has the benefit of
recycling the cans and saving their pull tabs, which she then donates to Clinton Savings Bank as part
of a charitable program to help people pay for cancer treatments and dialysis.
“[Cans] accumulate,” Ricci said. “There’s a lot of cans….people drinking beer and then throwing the
cans out the car window. It’s the situation where I have to bring a wagon with me to collect them,
because the bags get really heavy. I carry a rake, one of those trash-picker reach extender tools for
things out of reach.”
Rubbish accumulates on the edges of roads, in storm drains, ditches, and the shoulders of turns. It’s
not just cans that Ricci regularly finds: winter melts not only bring flowers and trees back into bloom,
but unearth clothing, soiled diapers, hats, and even tools accidentally dropped by pole workers from
the Municipal Light Department.
“I’ve found a lot of things, good and bad,” Ricci said. “Insulin pens, used needles, gloves, socks.”
A source of garbage can be traced to a two-fold problem: wind knocking over trash cans, whose
contents spill and spread by accident. Ricci recalls finding mail as well that has been torn out of
mailboxes.
“Once I found a light bill that had flown all the way across the street,” she said. “And the recipient
didn’t even know. I walked it back to him, knocked on the door and told him, ‘didn’t you know you
didn’t pay your light bill?’”
Roadside cleanup isn’t all that Ricci has contributed towards helping Sterling and the greater
residential areas. In 2019, she started a citizen’s petition in Sterling for a bylaw that would offer better
oversight and control of large-scale donation boxes placed by organizations such as Planet Aid and
Red Cross. While a good gesture in theory, the boxes are frequently known as dumping sites for
unwanted furniture and other household items.
“The bylaw wasn’t passed, but a regulation [by the town] was put into place,” Ricci said. “The boxes
went from eleven containers to four, because [the placing organizations] need to get a permit to place
a container. That was my effort to assist; because what happens, is that people were leaving anything
and everything.”
Collections on such containers were halted during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, with boxes
such as Red Cross containers left unattended in the parking lots of businesses such as the Mall at
Whitney Field in Leominster. Ricci took pictures of the state of these containers, some of which had
piles of garbage that had begun attracting rats, and presented the photos to the Leominster Board of
Health. As a result of her research into the problem, better control of container placement was
implemented in an effort to lessen dumping.
“If everyone put in a little more effort and were conscious of what they were doing, the trash wouldn’t
be there as it is,” Ricci said. She also notes that while the work is important, it can be hazardous. “A lot
of the roads in Sterling are very dangerous. When it’s windy or [there is garbage] up on the hills, you
can’t really tackle the stuff unless you have the space to get off the road. I have to work in the direction
of the traffic so I can see who’s coming.”
While Ricci acknowledges that not everyone has the time to pour into roadside cleanups, she does
stress that even a little goes a long way. “I do think that people can look around their houses, walk fifty
steps across the road and pick up trash; when they go out to get their mail, they can look around and
see what’s there.”
As of this publication Sterling’s annual Earth Day town clean up has already passed; Ricci supports
the effort, but notes too that the April 22 date gives vegetation such as poison ivy time to grow, as well
as the year’s new generations of black flies and other insects that may give some trash-collectors
pause. Roadside cleanup, as well as general environmental awareness of keeping Sterling clean, is a
year-long and four-season responsibility, regardless of weather and obstacles.
“If it’s maintained, it’s not so bad,” she said. “I’m not saying that everybody has to be me
about cleanup, but to help out. If you see it, bend over and pick it up.”
