Girl Scouts Hope to Keep Styrofoam Out of Landfills

Information courtesy of the Westborough Girl Scouts.

With the support of the and the sponsorship of , Westborough Cadette Girl Scouts, Bhargavi Ram and Kaleigh Wright, are bringing Styrofoam (Polystyrene #6) recycling to Westborough. They have been working on this project since the spring and have set a date of March 24 to hold their Reduce, Reuse, ReFoamIt! event at the Tufts Machine Lot on East Main Street from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The purpose of recycling Styrofoam is because it takes up a lot of space in landfills, as it is made up of 98% air. According to a press release issued by the Westborough Girl Scouts, the negative impacts of Styrofoam include:

• Toxic pollutants in the air when it is burned.
• It takes hundreds of years to decompose.
• In 1986, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that the polystyrene manufacturing process is the fifth largest creator of hazardous waste.
• Toxic chemicals leach out of these products into the food that they contain.
• These products are made with petroleum, a non-sustainable and heavily polluting resource.
• Polystyrene foam is often dumped into the environment as litter and can break into pieces that choke animals and clog their digestive systems.

Ram and Wright are partnering with ReFoamIt!, a company out of Framingham, MA, that takes loose Styrofoam pieces and, using intense pressure, condenses or densifies the Styrofoam into blocks that are turned into pellets to be used to make new products, such as picture frames, car bumpers and plastic brackets. For more information, contact ReFoamIt at 508-872-2323 or email ert@wrightbuzz.com.