“Let’s Talk Trash”

Professor Sarah Luria kicked off summer 2025 with a bold statement to her research students: “We’re gonna pick up a lot of trash, and we’re gonna try to make this sound like research.”

The class of 2027’s Bobbie Pitts, Brigit O’Connell and Del Hafizi joined the College’s Weiss Summer Research Program in order to work closely with Luria and Worcester’s Green Island neighborhood, located 2.5 miles away from Mount St. James. Historically home to a large immigrant population, Green Island is what Luria calls “a ground zero test case for Worcester’s revitalization,” where residents are at risk of being priced out of the neighborhood due to nearby residential and commercial development. Trash was an unexpected focus for the summer research team, but one about which they quickly got excited.

“It became really great research, because if our goal was to build community and to get more people engaged with Green Island, then being on the street [picking up trash] gave us an official reason to be there talking to people without, like, a clipboard,” said Luria, chair of the environmental studies department.

The work was a continuation of Luria’s class The Nature of Worcester, in which first-year students spent a year learning about Green Island and completing community-based learning projects with the Green Island Residents Group Inc. (GIRGI). Now in its fourth iteration, the course sought “to help GIRGI tell the story of Green Island,” explained Luria, whose recent work has focused on the effects of development on the area. Pitts and O’Connell took the course over the 2023-2024 academic year; Hafizi was recruited to join the team after declaring an environmental studies major in spring 2025. 

In collaboration with GIRGI community organizers, Luria and her students identified litter as a key problem on which to focus this summer.

“Trash is actually a really big problem,” explained Pitts, noting that it can contribute to Green Island’s issues with flooding and pollution, as well as people’s perception of the city. It’s also a delicate balance for the neighborhood: “If we try to fix [the trash problem], it's more prone to gentrification. So that's another thing that we have to think about.”

“Every urban space in the world, really, is going through some kind of revitalization and sustainability discussions. That’s the environmental side of it,” Luria said. But there’s a personal side, too – one that involves connecting with and becoming part of a community. As Luria walks through Green Island, she is always checking in with residents to catch up on the latest news: “That’s what I do now – I know people, I greet them. That’s part of community organizing, [asking], ‘What’s going on? How are you? What do we need to know about? Let’s talk trash.’”

The lifecycle of litter 

The City of Worcester operates on a “pay as you throw” trash system. Residents must buy a specific type of trash bag sold by the city; there are currently no rolling bins. This system, O’Connell said, perpetuates some trash issues: bags break, trash blows away and bags won’t get picked up if they exceed a weight limit. There are recycling bins, but those are small, break easily and are susceptible to being blown away or crushed by cars on a windy day. There are concerns for personnel: Trash collectors are more susceptible to injury via a bag’s contents.  And there are financial considerations: While paying for trash bags is intended to encourage residents to reduce waste, the cost of bags ($1 per small bag, or $10 per roll) can be a financial burden, and according to Luria, can also lead to dumping trash in private dumpsters or empty lots to avoid having to pay for pickup.

But another problem, Pitts and O’Connell explained, is simply lack of knowledge – what can and can’t be recycled, what incentives the city provides to encourage better waste disposal, and what happens to trash once it’s left on the sidewalk for pickup

Luria explained that it’s a popularly-held belief that recycling doesn’t work – that all recyclables will end up in a landfill or floating in the ocean regardless of how they’re disposed. But in fact, according to Worcester’s Zero Waste Initiative, Casella Waste Systems – the recycling company hired by the city and by Holy Cross – is committed to recycling 100 percent of non-contaminated materials that arrive at the recycling center; Worcester’s contamination rate is as low as 8 percent, compared to an estimated national rate of 17 percent. The recyclables just have to make it into the recycling bins in the first place. Both the trash service and the city provide searchable websites where residents can check to see if an item is recyclable or not. Broken recycling bins can be replaced free of charge, and people can sign up to become “litter champions” for their neighborhood – meaning they assume responsibility to clean up litter from their streets using free trash bags provided by the city.

“We were trying to figure out how we can make this information more available for people, because some people just don't know that these things exist,” Pitts explained.

The students attended community meetings to hear from residents and city officials. They visited local businesses to learn about the challenges of bottle buyback programs and mislabeled recyclables. They conducted site visits to a steel yard and to Casella to better understand the lifecycle of discarded materials. And through it all, the summer research team picked up trash: helping organize two community clean-up days with GIRGI, working with local residents to clean out their basements and yards, and picking up whatever litter they found while walking through the neighborhood, as they handed out flyers and got to know the community.

Mapping the problem 

Another contributing factor is the lack of public trash and recycling bins in Green Island – and the knowledge of where the ones that do exist are located. 

As the self-proclaimed “map guy” of the summer research team, Hafizi spent much of his time creating static maps of neighborhood locations that host bins and cigarette disposal receptacles. Using publicly available information provided by the state, American Community Survey and the census, and skills he learned in a geographic information systems (GIS) class in spring 2025, he walked the area, noting the coordinates of all the bins he saw in person. Hafizi then built four distinct maps of Green Island: one of all the trash and recycling bins, one of all cigarette disposal containers, one of the neighborhood’s litter champions, and one of property values to track the neighborhood’s gentrification. The maps can be used to find a trash or recycling bin and encourage residents to sign up as litter champions, as well as for the bigger picture.

“Pretty quickly we realized there were some areas where there's deserts of ashtrays and trash cans, where there could be and should be some, so I wanted to visualize that. The Green Island Residents Group can say, ‘Hey, we're seeing a trash pick-up on that intersection. There isn’t another bin for another three blocks. Maybe we should put something there,’” Hafizi explained. “Anyone who wants to see the map can zoom out and see what's going on over the big picture, because those things aren’t available on Worcester's city website.”

Hafizi and Luria plan to present these maps to GIRGI at a neighborhood meeting for the organization to use for their advocacy efforts with the city, with the hopes that one day they’ll be available online, and potentially interactive. 

“Hopefully [GIRGI] really does get the political power within Worcester to advocate for turning some of those empty lots into urban gardens, making sure that the city comes through with the street cleaning machine more often, or advocating for different sizes of bins for people,” Hafizi said.

“It could help GIRGI in a lot of different ways. It can help tell the story of place and give you new connections that you might make in a lot of different ways,” Luria explained. “It will help conceptualize the kinds of connections we might make between historical places, trash, environmental issues in the neighborhood, property rising values and gentrification.”

Back on campus

Holy Cross isn’t immune to the problem, either. Pitts and O’Connell explained that the month of May generates the highest amount of trash for Worcester, with students from the city’s seven colleges and universities moving out over the month. “A lot of that stuff is going to get thrown away if it’s not donated effectively,” O’Connell said. Holy Cross provides donation bins in a few residence halls year-round and during move-out, as well as a dedicated technology disposal day for hard-to-recycle electronics, but the students noted that it needs to become a more frequent and normalized practice. 

It’s also a daily concern. “From my personal experience, I'll look at the trash can and the recycling bin right next to it, and they look completely identical because students don't know where to put what,” O’Connell said. 

The students met with Carly Thibodeau, director of sustainability at Holy Cross, to understand the College’s efforts, as well as provide some of their own suggestions, including updating the signage over the bins to reflect items students actually use, such as Cool Beans cups. “I think that if students are able to very quickly be informed, it'll improve a lot,” O’Connell added. “Students have the heart, especially at Holy Cross – we really pride ourselves on going green. I think they just need that extra push.”

Trash is also one pathway into Luria’s bigger goal: for students to become more connected to the community and environment they live in, both now and in the future. 

“I want students to … see College Hill, South Worcester, Green Island through new eyes,” Luria said. “If they can do that here, they can do it wherever they end up living. The more they do that, the more chances are they'll feel interested in where they live, and perhaps even want to participate in caring for it – which is what we should all be doing.

“Trash matters,” Luria continued. “And in ways that we were surprised by – as a community organizing tool, and a community building tool, and an environmental issue. And it matters for college students extremely, as trash makers and future residents of some city or suburb that's gonna need a lot of their heart and soul if it's going to survive.”