“Bottle caps or no bottle caps?” I asked.
That was one of the big questions I had for Sally Davies, chair of the Greenwich Recycling Advisory Board.
But I had an even bigger question.
Why, I wondered, do Greenwich residents actually like to go to the dump? It’s not like it costs a lot to use a trash service. Anyway, Greenwich has the word “affluent” stuck in front of it with glue.
So why would Mary Bishop, an Old Greenwich social maven, have a weekly date with her husband at the Holly Hill dump? Why are the Bishops on first-name terms with Dexter, who makes sure nobody dumps things in the wrong place? Why does my former neighbor Meredith Sampson, an Audubon bird expert, look for books on wildlife at the dump library?
Yes, the Greenwich dump has a library.
I was curious about these stories, but hesitant to go see for myself. In Southern California, where I’m from, dumps weren’t destinations.
The closest one to my home in Santa Monica was a 500-acre pile in the Sepulveda pass separating the beach towns and Westwood from the San Fernando Valley. I drove up there once with my father, and found it necessary to hold my nose. It was scary to speculate on what might lie in those gigantic heaps of rubbish. Bodies? Toxic chemicals? Who knew?
At a BackCountry Jazz concert, I found myself between Sally Davies and the head of Greenwich Green and Clean. When Sally found out that after three years in Greenwich I was still scared of the town dump, she offered to show me around.
So, one summer morning we headed for the dump, properly known as the Holly Hill Resource Recovery Facility.
A guard waved us in.
The first thing I noticed is how organized everything is. Neat little lawns and trees border the roads. Signs point visitors to the various areas.
Near the entrance is a Goodwill trailer. At the next stop, you can heave recyclables like cardboard and bottles over a railing into a trench.
Following the arrows, you find places for food waste, cloth, yard trimmings, broken appliances, dead batteries, and outright trash.
Volunteers talk about past finds — a $500 mountain bike, gas grills in their original packaging. I didn’t see anything like that, but I did see some secret treasures that no one would expect at a dump.
In addition to being a major social spot, the Holly Hill dump is also a sculpture garden. You can see fanciful orange metal sculptures created by eminent sculptor Michael Manning, who uses recycled materials in his creations.
And then there is the famous library.
Almost no libraries accept used books nowadays, and Greenwich’s book swap is a big draw when it’s open on Friday and Saturday mornings.
Volunteers sort books for distribution to senior centers, resource-strapped schools, and homes for the disabled. Some books are on display, neatly shelved by category in the two book sheds. I was reminded of the used-book stalls along the Seine.
Officially, the library is called the Book Swap. Volunteers will energetically urge you to take some books home.
You may catch some distinguished Greenwich residents there. Among the volunteers accepting donations the day I visited was Alex Voulgaris, who this year became the first female moderator of the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting.
The RTM descended from New England town meetings dating back to the 1630s. At 230 members, it recalls the ancient democratic governing councils of Scandinavia and Iceland. And here was the RTM’s leader, taking in books.
Doug Francefort founded the book swap with his wife, Eleanor, in the 1970s. Lorie Stapleton runs the shed now, and she ferries books in a red Jeep. Janet MacKenzie, a former Greenwich High School English teacher, showed me around.
I also was curious about the town’s single-stream recycling. If you throw cardboard, bottles, cans, and newspapers into the same blue bin, how exactly does everything get sorted out?
Turns out that human hands are part of the process. Greenwich’s take goes to a giant sorting center in Stamford where workers pick through items on a conveyor belt. Sally used to take kids there on tours, but the center is now closed to the public.
The Greenwich Green & Clean website has everything you might possibly need to know about getting rid of stuff, including a Waste Wizard that tells where to put what. There’s even a Waste Wizard QR at the entrance to the dump.
By the way, the dump didn’t smell bad, except for around the food waste bin.
After I saw how easy it was, I started hauling my yard trimmings to the dump in brown-paper lawn bags. In two trips, I’ve saved $150.
Maybe there’s something to Yankee thrift.
Not everything can be taken to Holly Hill. Bottle caps, alas, are unwelcome.