Chester said the most commonly littered items were coffee cup, water bottles, cigarette butts, Bud Lights and cinnamon Fireball nips.
By James Kinneen
Hometown Weekly Reporter
“Why” is there a giant sculpture made out of chicken wire and rebar in the middle of Sherborn, and “why” do people keep filling it with trash?
In large part, because of the effort of Kim Chester. The art installation that will spell out “Why” once it’s been filled with litter from around town is part of The Litter Letter Project, a global collection of wire and rebar formed into large visual messages which, according to their website, is meant to “provoke response, thought and action.” Sherborn’s installation is the first to be built in Massachusetts - and in any American town north of Philadelphia. It came about because Chester was so sick of Sherborn’s litter problem.
“I’ve been picking up litter here for probably a decade and there just got to be so much of it everywhere,” Chester explained. “There was a one-day pickup every year in Sherborn where people would come and pick it up for one day, but the only people who really cared about that were the people who filled the bags and then they threw them away, so nobody knew about it. I started looking online for somebody that had solved the litter problem, or some creative ideas to deal with it, and I ran across the Litter Letter Project.”
Started by college professor Rachel Hatley, the project began in 2013 as her personal response to the litter around her Louisiana home. After dealing with Sherborn’s issues, which included one man who threw five pieces of trash a day out of his car window along Sherborn’s roads, Chester’s search for an answer led her to finding about Hatley’s project.
“I just became fascinated with how it took the litter out of the crevices along our roads and put it front and center, so people have to see it, because nobody looks at the litter, nobody wants to see it, they pretend they don’t see it, and in their minds it’s always somebody else’s responsibility to pick it up. I didn’t put it there, so why should I pick it up? Now when you put it in these letters and ask a question or make a statement, it gets your whole community involved. I’ve got the Girls Scouts, I’ve got the youth group, I’ve got all these families in town that are signing up to pick up litter and it becomes a thing where people understand what the problem is.”
Beyond the Litter Letter Project, Chester created Sherborn Picks Up to deal with the issue, and has designated the entire month of April as being devoted to cleaning up litter. She also reached out to Dorothea Von Herder, who helped secure funds from the Harold Grinspoon Grant. Brian Philips, who runs a solar company, designed and directed the building of the cages, while Chester wanted to put the cages in a place where residents of both Dover and Sherborn would see it.
But why “Why"?
“We selected the word ‘why’ because it really just seems to be a really great place to start in terms of getting the school kids to say, 'well, why is there so much litter? Why is there more of it? Why don’t people pick it up? Why do people think it’s some else’s job? Why can’t we stop it? Why are these letters in the center of town?'”
When it’s filled, Chester has permission to leave it up until mid-May, after which she will take it letter by letter to the DPW, take the litter out of it, and hose it down. She'll then store the structures, in case another community wants to borrow them - or in case they're used to create a new installment for Sherborn, sometime in the future.
