Register now. Some of the vehicles expected to be available for a test drive:
- BMW i4 sedan
- BMW iX SUV
- Chevrolet Blazer SUV
- Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan (seats 7)
- Ford Mustang Mach-E sedan
- and more
Since 2005: More than you really want to know about Wellesley, Mass.
Register now. Some of the vehicles expected to be available for a test drive:
Wellesley resident Jack Kenney has coordinated a free tree sapling distribution event in partnership with the Natural Resources Commission to celebrate Earth Week. Residents can pick up free saplings on Tuesday, April 23 and Wednesday, April 24 (while supplies last), 10am-2pm for both days, at Wellesley’s temporary Town Hall location, 888 Worcester St. 400 donated trees will be available .
This is the second annual tree sapling distribution event Jack has held in Wellesley. Last year his team donated 300 tree saplings for local families to plant on their private properties. Jack, a senior at the University of Vermont, says, “Being able to give back to the community where I grew up, went to school, and ultimately now operate our business has given me a such a deep sense of gratitude. Involving local residents and especially young kids in environmental education and project initiates like this helps grow awareness, community, and curiosity around the necessity of environmental activism and imperfect sustainability.”
The tree distribution event is made possible through the donation of the team from Holiday Haulaways. The local company founded in 2019, delivers, install, and recycle Christmas trees in environmentally innovative ways. His team turns the trees into mulch, woodchips for trail restoration, and feed for farm animals of local farms like goats. For each Christmas tree Holiday Haulaways recycles they plant at least one tree in the communities they work in.
Questions: Jack Kenney, 617-777-4150, jack@holidayhaulaways.com
Wellesley Girl Scouts troop 73505 are earning their Silver Award by coordinating a local event for the global City Nature Challenge. Join the Scouts on April 27 and April 28 (rain or shine) to document the biodiversity of Wellesley. The data collected becomes part of a citizen science project documenting the biodiversity across the globe. All ages are welcome. Registration is recommended. Walk-ins are welcome.
You are invited to Natick’s Earth Day festivities, April 27-28.
More than 30 events all over town have been organized by residents, families, community groups, and local organizations. Get outside, interact, learn, and do something good for the Earth and its living things.
Celebrate May Day, marking the halfway point between the spring equinox and summer solstice by joining the NRC and WFL at the Simons Park grand opening celebration on Wednesday, May 1, 5pm-6:30pm, at the Wellesley Free Library. Landscape Designer Evan Abramson will have a presentation outlining this 10k sq. ft. lawn conversion project, followed by a ribbon cutting ceremony and garden tour. Light snacks will be provided.
Wellesley’s Municipal Light Plant, Wellesley’s Climate Action Committee, and Sustainable Wellesley are hosting the 5th annual Wellesley EV Test Drive and Showcase on Thursday, May 9, 4pm-7pm, at MassBay Community College parking lot, 50 Oakland St., Wellesley. Register here.
Rain date: Thursday, May 16, 4pm-7pm
What to expect
Questions? Email Marybeth Martello, Sustainability Director, mmartello@wellesleyma.gov
Couch, a popular band we’ve written about because of its Wellesley connections, reached out to us about a partnership it has established with the non-profit Mass Audubon organization. The band celebrated Earth Day by offering fans a limited-edition green vinyl—and donating all proceeds to Mass Audubon.
“No organization in the Boston area does more than Mass Audubon to protect wildlife, conserve and restore resilient land, and advocate for impactful environmental policies. We’re so happy to be partnering with them and introducing their incredible work to our fans,” said Couch guitarist and manager Zach Blankstein, in a statement.
While the vinyl has sold out, Couch still encourages fans to donate to Mass Audubon via its custom link.
The Wellesley Recycling and Disposal Facility (RDF), located at 169 Great Plain Avenue, is gearing up to help residents take care of all their spring clean-out needs. Dates for paint collection; document shredding; hazardous waste collection; and the grand reopening of the Reusables Area have all been announced. Here’s the lowdown:
The RDF will collect old paint on Thursday, May 2, 3pm-6pm, and the first Thursday of each month through October 2024.
Paint is also available for the taking from the shed during regular RDF hours except during paint drop-off events. Stop by the RDF office for assistance.
Safely dispose of sensitive documents at the RDF on Sunday, May 5, 9am-3pm. The spring document destruction event is open to Wellesley residents only. It’s super easy to participate. You don’t even get out of your car, just make sure documents are corralled in a clearly marked brown paper bag or disposable cardboard box in the trunk of the vehicle. Once you give over your paper clutter, it’s goodbye forever. Shredded stuff cannot be returned to you. More guidelines here.
Shredding events typically get seven tons of documents from over 300 cars.
Safely, and without a fee, dispose of hazardous household waste and other items on Sunday, May 5, 9am-3pm, at the Recycling and Disposal Facility. Hazardous Waste Collection Day is an important component in Wellesley’s environmentally responsible approach to integrated solid waste management.
Here’s the list of accepted and unaccepted items.
If you miss the Wellesley hazardous waste collection day, you can contact Clean Harbors or New England Disposal Technologies Inc. to dispose of hazardous waste for a fee at their facilities.
For those new to town, the Wellesley RDF Reusables Area is like a daily free yard sale where one family’s trash is another family’s treasures. Drop off your household items that are in working order or easily repairable, then scout the well-organized tables laden with the cast-offs of others. Everything you bring, you donate. Everything you pick up is free, and you don’t have to bring a donation to “shop.” The swap area is a town treasure of a place, run by the Friends of Recycling volunteers (they can always use new members). We can’t prove it, but we guess there’s not a home in Wellesley that doesn’t have something, somewhere from the Reusables Area.
Our first find of 2024: A 2.2-quart Le Creuset teakettle in pristine condition. It takes discipline, but please follow the rules and limit your visits to 30 minutes per day.
Reusables hours of operation
7am-11:30 a.m. on Wednesday
7am–3pm on Thursday – Saturday
Closed on Sunday-Tuesday
RDF spring and summer hours of operation
7am-noon, Monday – Wednesday
7am – 3:45pm, Thursday – Saturday
10am – 3pm, Sunday (through November)
Memorial Day
Juneteenth
Independence Day
Labor Day
New in town? Get your RDF permit sticker here.
The Wellesley Recycling & Disposal Facility’s Resuables Area (169 Great Plain Ave.) is now open for the season.
Hours of Operation
7-11:30 a.m. on Wednesday
7 a.m. – 3 p.m. on Thursday – Saturday
Closed on Sunday-Tuesday
The RDF is only open to Wellesley residents.
When I swung by on Thursday morning there was a small but focused group of treasure hunters sifting through items, and a few volunteers (thank you!) in bright vests sorting out incoming items. I dropped off an eclectic few boxes of stuff, including a Red Sox snow globe, old hockey pucks, and some puzzles… and there’s more to come.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month released its long-awaited PFAS water pollution standards, and Wellesley officials are feeling pretty good about where the town stands on compliance even though the regs won’t go into effect for a few years.
The Wellesley Board of Public Works pulled together a quick meeting with the Health Department on April 12, two days after the EPA regs were announced, to discuss the town’s status related to the new regs and to hash out town messaging on the subject (see Wellesley Media recording). The town has updated its PFAS information page online.
Wellesley—with Town Meeting’s support—has invested serious time and resources into filtering out PFAS (aka, forever chemicals, or more technically, per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in recent years to adhere to tough state standards published in 2020 for what’s known as the PFAS-6 compunds, and is now well prepared to meet federal standards even though they don’t completely overlap with the state ones. Wellesley has investigated possible sources of PFAS in its water, but hasn’t come to any real conclusions other than that the stuff is pretty much everywhere (and surfaces not just in drinking water).
The town in 2022 put PFAS filtering technology in place at its Morses Pond treatment plant, which Wellesley had to pull offline when the state regulations first went into effect.
That investment, funded by the town and through federal monies, has proven effective in that PFAS has been reduced to non-detect levels (though PFAS treatment and water sourcing have increased water bills, significantly back in 2022 before settling back down to about 4% rate increases since). Exposure to elevated levels of PFAS have been linked to cancer, heart problems, and immune system issues.
Wellesley’s entire current supply of drinking water, both from town wells and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), complies with the state and federal regulations. The town is pulling about 500,000 gallons a day from the Morses Pond treatment plant, and seeks to boost that to closer to 750,000. It’s relying on the MWRA water for about two-thirds of its needs.
“What’s coming out of the Morses Pond treatment plant complies with these new standards, and to me, that’s the most important takeaway. The water we’re pumping out right now is a combination of MWRA water and Morses Pond water, and that water complies,” DPW Director David Cohen said during the April 12 meeting.
The town’s Rosemary Brook/Longfellow Pond and Wellesley Ave plants have complied with the state rules, but wouldn’t likely meet the federal standards; both plants are actually offline for now for maintenance and construction reasons. Wellesley would like to get them both back online at some point, as the town strives to balance its sources of water so as not to become over-reliant on any of them, including the MWRA. The town has also been in discussions with the MWRA to build a redundant connection to that water source some day, but that’s still years away if it happens.
While you might not want to get into all the acronyms, the EPA standards address compounds dubbed PFOA, PFO,PFNA, PFHxS, and HFPO-DA Gen-X Chemicals, as well as mixtures of them. Four of the six chemicals identified by the EPA are on the state list, though the mixture of chemicals is not part of the state rules, and the state rules include two chemicals not on the EPA list. The EPA has set limits for 4 or 10 parts per trillion of these chemicals being the maximum allowable amounts in drinking water.
Public water suppliers have three years to complete initial monitoring of their water, and Wellesley has already done this. The EPA is giving five years to meet the chemical limits—five years out public water suppliers will need to issue notifications if they fail to adhere to the standards. The DPW’s Cohen said the town will need to get further guidance from the state and feds on certain aspects of the new rules, and any possible updates to state ones.
“We have a plan, this is not a surprise to us,” Cohen said. “We’ve been actively dealing with it, we actually have dollars in our capital budget to provide additional treatment at our other water treatment plants, and by the way, we also have dollars programmed to help us build a second connection to the MWRA so that we can decide what future we want when that becomes a real option for us. We just need more time to get that treatment online, and this just adds a little complexity to the way we describe it.”
Cohen continued that “I don’t love the message coming from the EPA, the idea that there’s a new standard that we’re supposed to be taking seriously and we do. But you have five years to comply, that’s a hard message to get out there. What I would say is we’re not waiting 5 years for anything… We already have a plan to address this in place.”
For specific PFAS information and questions, contact Water & Sewer Superintendent Steve Olson at 781-235-7600 or email dpw@wellesleyma.gov
For health-related questions, contact the Wellesley Health Department at 781-235-0135. Public Health Director Lenny Izzo said during the April 12 meeting that the town will aim to provide more education about possible sources of PFAS beyond the drinking water.
Past coverage:
by Bob Brown
Every year, the Rotary Club of Wellesley purchases and bags 500 tree saplings for distribution to Wellesley fourth graders. Susy Jordon, Wellesley Town Horticultural technician, usually hands out the bagged saplings to the students for planting. She also teaches a lesson on Arbor Day conservation while handing out the trees. This year, the team is bagging 500 White Spruce trees, which make nice evergreens.
If interested, register to join the crew at the Wellesley Department of Public Works, 20 Municipal Way.
by Bob Brown
The town of Wellesley will make its newest push to encourage homeowners to go the heat pump route for heating and cooling at a webinar on Thursday, March 21 at 7pm. Registration is open for the event, co-sp0nsored by the Town of Wellesley’s Climate Action Committee, Municipal Light Plant, Health Department, and by Sustainable Wellesley.
Air source heat pumps have now had a few years to prove their worth as an efficient alternative to heating and cooling systems reliant on fossil fuels, and the webinar will include first-hand experiences of those that have made the move. Reducing carbon emissions from residential buildings is a big part of Wellesley’s efforts to hit net-zero goals under its Climate Action Plan.
This table supplied by Marybeth Martello, Wellesley’s Sustainability Director, shows the boom in heat pump installations in town, fueled to a great degree by adoption at multifamily buildings.
Air Source Heat Pump | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
Residential | 27 | 48 | 58 | 398 |
Comm/Non-profit | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
Ground Source Heat Pump (Geothermal) | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
Residential | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Comm/Non-profit | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
The webinar will also go over government financial incentives to install heat pumps, and provide information on Wellesley’s new energy coach program. Among the speakers will be a heat pump expert from Abode, a non-profit that partners with Wellesley’s MLP.
Sustainability Director Martello says air source, air-to-water, and ground source heat pumps, all of which are feasible with new incentives, will be covered at the webinar.