 Welcome, thank you Historical Society for inviting me to be here today. I have been in this room before and all the programs are always wonderful, so I feel honored to be included among speakers. So I am the recycling coordinator, which I think is really a funny name for what I do because what I really do is help people solve their problems. But of course I think a lot of jobs are that kind of a job, really. But I help people solve a particular problem, the problem of consumption, which we have to do to keep ourselves alive and clothed. But it is a problem and then at some point problems shift and change, our lives change, our situation changes, maybe we have to geographically change. So I really love my job because I get to really do that problem solving with residents who can't solve every problem. There are some problems that just can't be solved, but we try really hard and I appreciate Patsy's mentioning a few of our really successful newer programs like the SwapShed. So I will be talking mostly about context, about how we got where we are today. And I can say at the end, I have got a couple of show and tell things up here, so I can be happy to ask questions here and tell you about a few other upcoming events if you want to learn more. So first we have to get down to the emotional reality of what we're actually talking about today because stuff slash we're done with it, so it's now waste, has a lot of emotional content to it. And some of us are forever going to save everything that we possibly can. It's just how we're built, maybe we can blame our parents, maybe in the therapy session, but maybe it's just the way we were built, maybe our parents or our siblings were very different from us. And other people are just natural born minimalists and I don't know quite how one person gets to be one and one person gets to be the other, but I do know that if you love stuff and you wish you were a minimalist, it's very frustrating. It's very hard to stop caring about the things that are around you so much. So these phrases might look familiar to some of you, these are some of the reasons that we hear from residents all the time about how they're interacting with their stuff emotionally. So they're just not sure if they're ready to give something up. There's a lot of nostalgia connected to our belongings. And some people have a lot of, I don't know if you, this is probably not any of you, but some people you know probably have a little bit of guilt about the purchase thing that they do do. And there's a lot of reasons for that. We have a lot of societal pressure to purchase. I grew up in the 80s. It was my civic duty. It was my national duty to purchase things in the 80s and that's the childhood that I had. So I did my duty. I thought I was doing the right thing. But now, if you need to move, if you need to make some kind of change in your life, sometimes it can come up on you rather suddenly and you realize, well, that's a lot of stuff in my attic that I've accumulated all these years, decades, or my kids left them behind or that relative who asked if I could hold on to her record collection for a few years, 15 years ago, I now have her record collection in my attic. Beautiful collection. But how do we get, how do we let these things go? Well, it has not always, well, let me just a little bit more about defining waste, first of all, because we have not always had waste, believe it or not. Waste, these are sort of modern examples of waste. That shopping that I was talking about, shopping gives us a little bit of a jolt of positive energy. We sometimes, we repurpose waste easily. We've all been on those tire swing at some point in our lives. Some of us don't even know all the times that we've reused things from past generations. But that sandwich that you ate one minute and then put in the trash the next minute, that was an object that you purchased and then the next minute when you didn't want it anymore, the second half of it went in the trash, all of a sudden it's disgusting. And this is so true, we see this with kids at Arlington High School and in the elementary schools. Once something goes in a trash can, it's just too gross to touch. It's just too, so if you made a mistake and you put your sandwich in the recycling by accident and you were supposed to put it in the compost, which they're doing at the high school, it's very hard for them to reach their hands in and actually touch that sandwich that a few minutes ago they paid for and were putting in their mouths. So sometimes trash just becomes trash in an instant. So how can I say that there was never always trash? Well, we can think back to human history when we had fewer possessions, we didn't have big box stores, we didn't need 18 changes of clothing or 16 pairs of sneakers. We had people who lived much closer to the land, people who lived in, we, our ancestors, were more agricultural. We put everything to use. Nothing was wasted as Patsy explained in some of her examples, what you didn't eat went to your animals. Human beings have always been very codependent on animals. And then in our history all over the world, in pre-industrial times, there were objects were to be valued deeply and not thrown away easily. In fact, you might be buried with them if you were very important. So I think we can all relate to this, the image on the bottom right too of the older person in our family. I know I inherited a few quilts from my grandmother. Again, back to that nostalgia. These are really hard things to get rid of if they become at the end of their lives because they carry history. They carry the history of someone's shirt or someone's dress that they wore when they were young. Again, this emotional part, and this contributes to my argument that really we have not always had trash. So where did trash come from? It came from moving into cities. It came from having limited space. It came from industrial practices. It came from manufactured goods. It came from disconnecting human beings from a natural environment, from living in an urban place where the streets are busy with vehicles and we needed to have our trash placed farther and farther away from us, of course, often for very important public health reasons. But we've also, since we've started creating waste, we have also saved that waste and held onto it and repurposed it. And wartime is a great example of that. It is far back as the Revolutionary War, metal was recovered to be smelted and made back into artillery. So war is always a great mechanism as we know for progress, for a technical progress and industrial progress. It's also been played an important role in helping human beings hold onto things and really rethink how does this thing, does this object only have one chance at a life or can we give it another kind of a life? So we're now in the 1940s. Really, this was how people got rid of their trash or they burned it in the backyard, as Patsy explained. There were people whose whole jobs and industries where people would recover materials like the ragman, families whose family business evolved maybe later but started out really as a resource recovery kind of a business. So here in Arlington, as Patsy pointed out, we had landfills. Landfills really didn't exist until this era, this post-industrial or this second World War era. This is not Arlington, Massachusetts landfill. I couldn't find historical picture of the Arlington landfill so I beg you today to help me find that. If any of you are archivists, I think that would be a fascinating thing to see. They must be out there but I couldn't find them with my basic, rather basic search. This is Arlington, Virginia. But a modern landfill or dump looks very much like it did in the past. I think the things that probably have changed over the years is that the trucks that roll over and smush the trash and break it up have probably gotten bigger and heavier and stronger but it's the same basic idea. When we don't have a use for those materials, the original place that we thought to do with it, either burning it in the backyard, was to dig a big hole and bury it and then cover it up. So in Arlington, we had mostly the dumps, the landfills, that's the more technical term, that we had in Arlington were near Poets Corner on Route Two and that's the mark on the left and then the top one is what was called the Berkeley dump and now MacLennan Park, as you're all familiar. And these are registered as having closed at different times. There were four, I guess, landfills in the town of Arlington. They're all inactive and closed, you'll be glad to know. The first one closed in 1947 and the last one closed in 1971. Has anybody been here that long in 1971, living in town? Do people remember going to the dump, to the landfill? Was it a place that residents went to? Yeah, about this time, around 1972 is when I have a first memory of recovering, recycling in my hometown, which was outside of New York City, and going with my mom to smash bottles at the recycling area. But I don't think there was recycling like that quite here. But one environmental thing I wanted to point out here because of course all of the repercussions of what we've done in the past live with us today and none of our landfills are lined. So a modern landfill would be lined and this would be a way to manage how when our materials are decomposing, how they are affecting, for example, groundwater supply. We also have the problem of methane gas that collects in landfills and is managed or not in landfills depending on the ages of the landfills. And methane gas is a very strong greenhouse gas. So again, that idea that what the best solutions that we had when we developed them nowadays would have been designed a little differently and we are living now with some of the repercussions of those. One nice thing is that you can cap a landfill and we have great parks in Arlington on top of our landfills. In Lexington, there's a great solar farm on top of one of their landfills. Solar farms and parks are very common things to go on top of a landfill. So in a second option with trash, and this was something that I guess the, I don't, when was the first, the first incinerator in the US was built actually in 1885 according to Wikipedia in Governor's Island in New York and an incinerator can be just a big smokestack. We've all seen them coming in and out of cities. But this is a waste to energy facility. This is a more modern version of an incinerator and this actually does create electricity. And this is from the incinerator that our trash goes to. It's been going, we've been going there for quite a while. It was built in 1985 and it is called Wheelibrator North Andover. It's been taken over a few times. Now it's called Wind Industries. It's a great tour. I sometimes I'm able to run tours there. It's fascinating. And what it's doing is it's capturing as much of the toxins as it can. A lot of the materials that have been in our trash over the generations have included mercury. Mercury is very dangerous when it comes back down as rain. It's a big problem. So before we had modern incinerators and we had old fashioned incinerators, we really didn't know what the environmental implications were of burning our trash. So that was up to the 1960s. And then we had some laws passed, 1970. What was that? Would anybody know what that law was called? 1970, the first one? Clean Air Act. And two years later was Clean Water Act. And so this is really when we leapt into an environmental era. And we started to realize how much damage we were doing to the environment without understanding fully the technology that we were using. So Wheelabraider, I don't have a picture of it right now, but Wheelabraider was built in 1985 by over 20 communities had to get together to build Wheelabraider. Does anybody remember that being in the news? It was a big deal. It was a really big deal. It was a big commitment by the town of Arlington to participate as one of those communities. And it was expensive. And it was gonna solve a lot of problems for us. It was gonna give us a place to take our trash. But it had this really strange, perverse incentive, which is that we had to commit to creating, and not creating, but we had to commit to supplying a certain amount of tons of trash every year. Because they needed that much to guarantee that they had enough feedstock of trash to create the electricity that they were hoping to also make some profit on. And that's the way waste energy works. You burn the trash, but you recover the energy by creating steam and running a generator to make electricity. Wheelabraider powers 20,000 homes with electricity. So that's not nothing. That's something. But good thing we have clean air and clean water laws in place because even with modern technology of incineration, there are a lot of concerns. We're really only reducing our trash by 90%. The other 10% is ash, like in your fireplace or your summer barbecue pit. So that ash has to be managed very carefully with a lot of environmental regulation in place. And things can always go wrong. You've probably heard news stories about things going wrong. So I know I'm getting very depressing sounding right now, but I think this is what you all would expect in a talk about trash and waste and waste diversion. We're gonna get to more diversion soon. But it is important to know where your trash goes. First to an incinerator, and then the ash goes to landfill. Now, in Massachusetts, it's very important to know that we have a law that has capped, it disallows us to build any more incinerators in the state. So that means, and we have no more, oh, did I forget to mention, we have no more landfills. All the landfills are closed. I think there's one or two that have a couple more years left on them, not around here. So what's gonna happen to our trash? When the incinerators break, which they will, they'll come to the end of their useful life and there's no plan to make a law to say, sure, we'll just build another incinerator. That doesn't really match with our net zero goals. This still creates carbon emissions. And as hopefully many of you have heard, we have pledged as a town and also as a state to become carbon neutral by 2050. So that is something that we are actually legislated to reach, which means that we have to watch how much trash we create as a state and get it constantly have the pressure pushed down on creating trash and therefore creating emissions. So what happens when the incinerators break or they go down for servicing or they reach their end of useful life? What are some of the other options? Does anybody wanna take a guess what's gonna happen to our trash next? What's on the horizon for Arlington and all of Massachusetts? We're gonna send it on trains to other states for them to put it in their landfills. It doesn't disappear. I'm sorry, I really wish I could tell you there was and away where we could put all of our junk. But we're gonna trip it to other states where they have more space for landfills. So this has just happened. Did anybody remember this in the news that this, it didn't end up being an environmental crisis but this train derailment was scary cause of course we had that horrible trail derailment. So can only imagine with more train and train, more and more train derailments in the news, this is gonna become less and less palatable to the public. Luckily the state of Massachusetts has goals to help us reduce our trash, lots of incentive programs and one of them is of course to reduce our trash through recycling, waste diversion. So in Massachusetts we have, there it says six landfills left, they're almost done. So Massachusetts has waste ban laws on the books. And this is a progressive policy, not that many states have this kind of public policy to help reduce the amount of trash that we make. And these started a number of years ago but we're continuing to make new laws, new waste bans to help push down the amount of trash that we make. So you probably know if you have a refrigerator or an air conditioner or a stove or an oven, you can't put those in the trash. They have to get separated and that's state law. So we also have construction demolition debris, hazardous waste, these are things by state law we are not allowed to include in solid waste. So that's good. So what about the other recycling that we think of all the time? Why is that blank? Oh, there we go. Because I made it a fun interactive slide. So Earth Day in 1970 was really the birth of sort of a modern awareness of our, of the environmental effects of our waste production. So this is when a new industrial mechanism was built it's called a material recovery facility or a MRF and that's just a diagram. It's a multi-level giant set of conveyor belts and magnets and eddy currents and optical eyes that can see what kind of plastic that is and it will puff this way if it's a water bottle and puff that way if it's a laundry detergent bottle and puff that way if it's a milk jug because those different kinds of plastics all have to be sorted back out from each other. So this is a modern miracle. We now have curbside recycling. Now you can put all of your recycling in a single container and then when you send it to the MRF they're gonna separate it all out into different commodities because what we have to remember about recycling is that is it the beginning of a remanufacturing process we're creating raw materials to be made into something else. So this sounds like a solution to all the problems of where we're gonna put our trash, right? We could just recycle everything. But unfortunately not everything was designed not all kinds of, I'm gonna use a word here that's a very important word, not all kinds of packaging was designed to be recycled. So your soda cans, aluminum is infinitely recyclable. Paper, paper products extremely recyclable for a long time and then as they get more and more recycled the fibers get shorter because it's a growth from a tree. If the fibers get shorter it can be made into lower quality paper products, cardboard, tissue paper, things like that. So some of our materials can get recycled quite a number of times. But a plastic chip bag is not designed to be recycled and we have a lot of those flying around and we also know the environmental consequences of having this light packaging that can't be recycled floating around in our natural environment. So let's see. There is a lot of news about recycling and it is not often very good news and it's very disturbing for people like me who work in a community like Arlington to have people call me and say, well you know I just heard on the news that it's not really a thing. Recycling's not really happening. And I ask them, well now you're talking to the Arlington Recycling Coordinator, do you think I would lie to you? There is some bad news. Globally recycling like oil, like corn, like pork bellies are a commodity. It is something that's floating around the world, getting shipped from places where recycling is created like in Arlington and cities and urban areas, two places where manufacturing is happening. What kind of manufacturing is happening in Arlington? Well maybe we should start some. Because wouldn't it be great if we could keep all of our yogurt containers and our laundry detergent bottles right here in Arlington? But as we can imagine, that's probably not gonna happen. But the new environmental policies from other parts of the world have created more manufacturing opportunities in this country and even in Massachusetts. So there is actually recycling going on within the state of Massachusetts. There's a company called Preserve and Lemonster. Really Lemonster has a lot of plastic recycling companies. And they will purchase this material from the big commodities market. They will put it into their new plastic products and they will sell it back to you happily. And that is a huge emission savings when we are not extracting raw materials from the earth and we are reusing this material that we have already used but only once usually. Let's use it again and again and I can guarantee you that recycling is happening. So this is a picture of the material recovery facility. And it's just really the small pictures are hard but I think the most interesting one is the top right one with the forklift and the big bail of recycling. That's what they're selling. So they charge us to drop off our recycling and then they sort it all out and then they bail it up like that and they put it on big trucks and they sell it. There is a market for recycling. And when people say they're not really sure recycling is happening, what I've come to realize after doing this for about a decade is that what people really mean is plastics because I think we can all understand how aluminum becomes another aluminum can and how paper becomes cardboard or paper again because we buy recycled paper, right? We're contributing to that process of remanufacturing by going to Staples and saying, okay, I'm gonna buy the recycled paper. It's 10 cents more but I'm gonna buy it anyway. You're contributing to a healthy remanufacturing of materials. So yay, you. And if you don't do it yet, you can start today. Just look out for the recycled, see that it's made from recycled material. So since we know that plastic packaging is so confusing and so much of it is not recyclable, it's true. Like I said, those chip bags and a lot more is not recyclable, we have great news for you. The state of Massachusetts is leading in this and they got together with all those material recovery facilities that there are in Massachusetts, they're only eight or nine. They got them all together at a table which is really hard to do with people in the competitive industry, as you can imagine. And they said, all right, seriously guys, what is recyclable? And that's what we present to you. This is what I present to you. Recycle Smart MA. Any community in Massachusetts can sign on to these rules. Many, many have and Arlington did in a number of years ago. So the rules are the same in Arlington, as in Mashpee, as in Pembroke, as in Amherst. We have the same set of rules. You do not have to relearn a whole new set of rules if you go visit your sister-in-law in, I don't know, holden, right? You don't have to learn another set of rules. We had this, hopefully, clearly on the town's website. We tried to make it available in paper form for people who like it. It's still confusing because these pictures aren't actually all that great and there's still a lot of questions. But if you can remember that bottles, jars, jugs, and tubs from your kitchen or your bathroom and your laundry, that's your recyclable plastic. If you have a telephone that you want to recycle, it's made of plastic. This is a lot of plastic in this phone. But this is not designed to be recycled. And it's definitely not designed to be recycled at the curbside, in your curbside recycling program. So we have to make some compromises. We have to spend some energy sorting out our trash from our recycling in order for that to be a material. But just think back to your ancestors who were sorting out rags and horse hair. Horse hair was something that was recovered. Burlap sacks were recovered. These were valuable things that could be made into something else. It's confusing. I admit it's confusing. So try to simplify it for yourself and forgive yourself if you get it wrong. But what we don't want to do is over recycle, like putting a phone in your recycling bin or a wire hanger just because it's metal does not go in your recycling bin. We don't want to over recycle because that sorting facility is only designed for certain kinds of materials, those kinds. And that's it. So in order to make this searchable, there is a cool link on our website called Recyclopedia. You can plug in all those takeout containers that you're confused about. You can plug it in there and it will show you pictures. And even explain to you why or why not it's recyclable. Again, it's recyclable if it can be made into something new. And it can only be made into something new if it can be safely collected and sorted. And there's a market for it. Someone's going to buy it to make it into something new. That's just economics. We can't make people make something from something else. So moving to today, as Patsy mentioned, we do have some programs that we think are helping with forward thinking. We can't recycle ourselves out of the problem of having so much waste, having all of our food products that we're just going to the grocery store to buy dinner supplies and we can't help it. We're attacked by the plastic packaging, the variety of plastic packaging coming at us. It's really, really, really, really hard to avoid. So we're working on more and more programs, but the drop-off programs that are available to you include things like a plastic telephone. When this is recycled as electronic waste, that plastic is entering a different, it's not going to a material recovery facility, it's going to a different stream of remanufacturing. It's going to the electronic waste stream. And there are lots of materials in here that can be recycled and plastic can be chipped up and melted into new things. We have reuse programs. We'd love to encourage a lot of the reuse that you probably see around if you're on social media at all. Facebook Marketplace, everything is free. It used to just be Craigslist or FreeCycle, but now you can really give away just about anything in Arlington. And we have a fabulous ethos in Arlington that using something that someone else is getting rid of is a good thing. Not everybody feels that way. Not everybody in this room probably feels that way, but a lot of people in Arlington are very, very happy to reuse and we're really, really happy as a town to help make that happen. It's a win, win, win situation. To reduce packaging. So we have some cool things. I don't know if you guys have been to the yes plastic free store in Arlington. Okay, we got an applause over there. That's a great place if you really want to take some next steps that reducing plastic packaging because they can help you refill your soft soap container next to your sink or sell you laundry soap or dishwashing soap in bulk. So that's a fabulous resource if you want to take an individual step. As a community, we're really promoting composting because that's the heaviest thing in your trash. And now imagine you're a sloppy wet, like let's say I made a fruit salad. Such a yummy thing. I've got all my fruit salad stuff. I've got my peach skin, my cantaloupe brine, my apple cores, and everything is sitting there for a couple hours and getting nice and juicy and wet. And then I'm gonna put it in my, imagine putting that mushy, wet, yummy stuff into an incinerator. What is it gonna do to the incinerator? If it goes with my trash, it's gonna go into the incinerator. It's going to negate the heat potential of my incinerator. Now if I have a bunch of wood shavings I've just taken up a wooden spoon carving. If I put those in my trash, that incinerator will love that because that's gonna burn fast and hot and make electricity. So not even the incinerators want your food waste. They don't want it. We don't want it because our only thing pays per ton. And about 25% of our tonnage is probably food scraps. So this would be a really good thing for our bottom line and for the environment. When you can take those yummy peelings from your fruit salad and put them into a controlled composting environment, you are making, you are adding nutrition to the soil. And if you didn't know it, you are 100% thankful that the soil exists because you couldn't exist without it. Right? We have to all be really careful with our soils. If any of you, I know there are plenty of gardeners in here. I know them personally. You know firsthand, but any of you who eat, many of you eat. All right, so you also like the soil and need healthy soils. And then we're always looking for new materials. It would be really great to have a paint take back day, for example. Paint is basically liquid plastic. And we would love to get that out of the trash because if you're not holding onto it in your basement because you don't know how to get rid of it. And if we can find a way to get it out of your basement faster, like right after you finish that paint job, that paint can actually be reused. It can be remixed. This is happening in the States all around us. There are great programs that take back paint. So you don't have to have it in your basement. And it can be on walls and probably we can just pay less for it, right? So we're looking at all kinds of things both as a state of Massachusetts, but also as a town of Arlington. So here's my plug for food scrap diversion. If you're not a composter, that's fine. Not everybody's into it. A lot of people are afraid of critters in their backyard or they have no use for it. But since we all eat, we've established that, you can subscribe to food scrap diversion programs at the curb. It's not the same as when you used to be able to put the, does anybody remember the little metal things, the little in your yard and you put that in there and then the hog guy would come along and take your food scraps. We're basically going back to the beginning people, but now we're giving you a plastic container and you have to pay, sorry. It's not as good as it was. Nothing is quite as good as it was in the past, but we are trying to relearn from the past. There were really, I mean, our grandparents, they didn't need to think about compost. They didn't need to think about what's happening to their food scraps. They probably didn't buy too much. They probably cooked and ate it all, but since we do buy too much and we don't eat at all, we have to have a composting solution. So consider that program. Then other new things, things that really were not a problem in the past but are a problem today is we have way too many clothes in the world and they're made very quickly. They're made very inexpensively. We don't need to have as many clothes as we do have, but we have this problem with too many clothes. So the state of Massachusetts in all its wisdom have now banned you from putting textiles. So that's clothes, shoes, luggage, sheets, towels. They've banned you from putting it in the trash. So I ask your help because I can't come to every trash can and check through and make sure that you've put a T-shirt in there that you weren't supposed to. So tell all of your friends and neighbors that started just last November, but textiles are a decent percentage of our trash weight as a state. And so we now have lots of bins to drop off like we used to. Everyone's got their favorite organization that they're already donating to. You don't have to change your behavior at all. Just remember that if you have the really, really worn sheets and towels that you think no one's gonna want, even those are recyclable, but you don't have to wrap them up nicely and bring them to goodwill if you don't want to, though they'll take them to. You can now do a curbside program. I'll let you know more about that or it's on our website. You can just put them in a bag on a Wednesday with an appointment that you make online and they'll pick it up for you. We just wanna get all of those old sheets and towels, curtains, pillows out of the trash. So we ask that you remember to recycle them and mattresses, but that's another story. But mattresses are no longer allowed in the trash either. Also, as of November 1st, last year. So other activities that, again, probably remind you of your grandparents, we can fix things. Did you know that? We can actually fix some things, not everything. But fixing is something that can be done and we're starting to have more and more events where we coach people, people who are really good with their hands like a Chuck might help someone like me who's a little nervous to open something up, give me some confidence to open something up, see if we can tweak this, tweak that, rewrap that, change the wiring and we can fix a lot of things. We just had a fix-it clinic on Saturday at Robin's library and it was very successful. We fixed a lot of things. It was really fun and everyone's learning and everyone's getting less afraid of opening up their scary electronic things. We always have giving away too. I know that probably a lot of people who hear of made donations and there are a lot of great organizations out there. I'll put a pitch in for, if any of you are downsizing in the next few years, Household Goods in Acton is a furniture bank for people who really, they don't have anything for their home. Whether it's their refugees or they're fleeing domestic violence or they've had a fire. So they get to come and pick a whole house full of furniture and it would be furniture donated by residents such as you. So if you want to find out more about that, check out Household Goods in Acton, really fabulous organization. So on the right is the picture of the security bottles to refill your hand soap at the Yes Plastic Free Store. That's one way that people are reducing their single-use plastic and this is becoming more and more of a thing. You probably have a child or a niece or someone in your neighborhood who's really into this. The real environmentalists are trying to figure out how to not use plastic at all, practically impossible, but banning plastic bags, banning styrofoam in towns like Arlington, which we've done, saying no thank you when you get takeout to the spoon and the fork that comes with a meal. These are things that our Zero Waste Committee is working to help build more public awareness and participation in. So these are sort of the everyday things that you can do to reduce plastic in your own lives, especially that single-use plastic. We all have to have a phone. We all have to have certain things, a television. I love TV. We're all gonna have a TV. There's a lot of plastic in TV. That's okay, because you're not using it once and throwing it away. But all those things you are using once and throwing away, we can rethink that. This is a company that I mentioned before in Lemonster that recycles number five plastic, which is your yogurt cups or your margarine tubs or your cottage cheese tubs, into durable plastic that you can use. If you have an environmentalist in your life and you'd like to buy them a present, you can buy them a preserved item and you can get those, I think, at Whole Foods. So a plug for thinking about what you're purchasing, using your consumer power to support the recycling mechanism. Sort of extracting from the earth, using something, figuring out a way to make it into something else and use it again. Keep it in that loop before we have to put it in the trash for its final resting. So this is just a little picture of our website. We have EcoFest coming up, which is gonna be a whole month of activities. Around town, litter cleanups, park cleanups. There's Swap Shed's gonna be opening a lot more this spring. We just had a paper shredding event, but we have another one coming up in May. Everybody loves a good paper shredding event. And we have the guide to download there. That little symbol is my download the calendar here. There are a lot of things going on all the time. If you wanna pick up a hard copy of the calendar, I have them up here right now. And we really try to, the website is really the way that we can put out information fast. We can make up a new event and put it on the website. I try to get it in town notices too. And we know that not everybody loves going onto the website and being asked to go to the website to look something up. So you could always just call. Just call and say, when's the next shredding event? But if you do like using email and it's useful, do sign up for town notices because that's your number one way to get the top button issues that are going on in town. And if there's a paper shredding event, you will just get an email saying, there's a paper shredding event in three weeks. Put it on your calendar and you're good to go. So that's what I have in terms of slides and presentation. Thank you for your questions and attention.