‘It’s great to see everyone doing something nice’: Wareham knows how to talk trash

While volunteers litter-ally lined the street and filled a dumpster with trash they found in the woods, Don’t Trash Wareham was off to a great start.

Don’t Trash Wareham is a beautification event that has been taking place in Wareham since 2015. This year’s rendition took place Sunday, June 8 on Recovery Road and was organized by Select Board member Joey Still and the newly founded Wareham Business Association.

The event was originally town-wide and residents would pick up trash wherever they were in the town on a given date. At its height, the event had about 400 participants, but numbers suffered greatly due to the pandemic.

Spearheading its revival is lifelong Wareham resident and Select Board member Joey Still who plans on organizing three to four Don’t Trash Wareham cleanups a year. Still said in his 23 years of living in town, seeing trash and litter is nothing new.

“I have never not seen trash around here, and it’s disgusting to have it be there,” Still said “There’s not a lot of people that get out there and [clean it up], but I am trying to do it on a larger scale, so more people can come out and [clean] too.”

As trash started to overflow in the dumpster, Still’s godson, Justin Munroe, 13, said the most interesting thing he picked up was a little kid’s mattress and added the people of Wareham are attuned to tossing their trash anywhere.

“People like to litter,” he said.

Another lifelong Wareham resident and organizer, Matthew Buckingham, said he is always motivated to clean, but his real motivation lies in wanting to make Wareham beautiful again.

“When you drive by and you see something, you have to do something about it. You can’t just look the other way…and a lot of people have been doing that for a long time,” he said, “We like to advocate for the town and for the people to clean, because we have pine barren forests and oceans. We are lucky to have all this here.”

Owner of Catone Lawn Care and Maintenance and Catone Dump Services, Ron Catone’s motivation in helping is to support the town, like Wareham supported him and his family in 2016 when he first moved here.

Several mattresses were found during the cleanup and Catone said disposing of mattresses is very expensive.

“It’s over $200 a ton, and every time we dump one of these dumpsters, it costs $200 or more,” Catone said “Today is probably going to be four or 500 dollars. It could be more depending on the mattresses.”

Still, who has been organizing cleanups around town for many months challenges Warehmites to pick up trash whenever they see it.

“If you’re outside one day, and you see trash on the side of the road, are you just going to walk by or are you going to go pick it up,” he said.