ATHOL – Like a commanding officer, Al Benjamin stood over a map of Athol with streets highlighted in red with notations of which volunteers were assigned to those neighborhoods.

The map and names gave organizers of Saturday’s Green Clean Athol an idea of how much of the town was being worked by a force of volunteers armed with bags and gloves, intent on picking up as much trash as they could over a three-hour period. Gray skies and a slight breeze provided comfortable weather for the volunteers.

At the headquarters for the cleanup near the senior center at Lord Pond Plaza, Nick Longo and Paul Goyetche stood with bags in hand, discussing their plans for the morning ahead.

“This is my first time doing this,” said Longo. “I live up on Laurel, I’ve been here for a couple of years. This is the first time I’ve heard about this. I do this kind of on my own, but Paul stopped me and asked me if I wanted to tag along and I said, ‘Sure.’”

Longo said he began his own cleanup campaign walking from his home his to job at Hannaford.

Goyetche is one of the organizers of the annual cleanup.

“I used to walk through here,” Goyetche said with a sweeping motion indicating the parking lot at Lord Pond Plaza, “and it was all trash every day. So, I just decided I was going to start picking up trash. I live over where the Hapgood Spring is over on Hapgood street. There was always trash around there and so I’d pick up the trash there.”

Logan and Goyetche said they would spend the morning cleaning up South Street, up toward the water treatment plant.

“The big thing is nip bottles – nip bottles and straws,” said Goyetche, referring to the small bottles of alcohol that are often found dumped by the side of the road. “Last year we went down South Street and we separated the nip bottles and in about two hours we got over a thousand.”

A bit further east, Susan Paju, Hans Rickheit, and Rickheit’s wife, Chrissy Dorn, were busy cleaning up Vine Street, which Green Clean organizers said is a prime spot for disposal of nips and other trash.

“I just arrived here a few minutes ago, and I’ve already filled a bag with broken glass,” said Rickheit.

Paju said she and event organizer Heidi Strickland regularly walk the Vine Street neighborhood, “and it’s bad. There are no houses until you get to the end of the street, so I think people drive in here and they just dump stuff—anything and everything.”

Rickheit said while his wife has participated in Green Clean Athol before, this was his first time.

“We’re from Orange…and it would be nice if Orange did something like this,” he said.

Dorn said she and her husband got involved, in part because “we’re good friends with Heidi. When I started going to the Unitarian Church in Orange, which Heidi attends, I noticed on the wall that she had started the ‘ban the plastic bag thing’ for here. I said, ‘Wow, that’s really impressive.’ So, we became good friends.

“She can make me do anything she suggests,” she added with a wide smile.

While a final count of the amount of trash and various items collected Saturday won’t be available until mid-week, Strickland said on Sunday that the cleanup went very well.

“We had a good number of volunteers, and I would say the day was a success,” she said.

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