We’re making more trash bloom!

Sustainability Matters’ Making Trash Bloom project - planting native pollinator and wildlife habitat at landfills - is growing into two new counties. We couldn’t be more excited to be planting in Rappahannock and Fairfax Counties this fall.

Our two new communities are very different: Rappahannock, a rural county of 7,000 people, and Fairfax, Virginia’s largest and most diverse urban county, with a population of 1.1 million. Both landfills are “closed”, which means they’re no longer filling trash cells on site. Closed landfills - over 10,000 of which blight our national landscape - are normally dead space, never able to be built on, farmed, or re-forested. We’d love to see them all become eco-friendly public parks or spaces where wildlife and pollinators can thrive undisturbed. Our long-term goal with Rappahannock and Fairfax is to explore this potential, eventually planting native meadows throughout the landfills.

We’re building gradually, beginning with pilot plots at both sites. Meadow establishment is tricky under the best of circumstances, exponentially more so on steeply sloped sites with barely two feet of soil above a thick plastic liner and acres of trash! Like most landfills, Rappahannock and Fairfax also suffer from intense pressure from invasive plants. The pilot plots planted this fall, in conjunction with our ongoing work at Making Trash Bloom’s first location, the Shenandoah County Landfill, will test seed mixes, site preparation and planting techniques, and invasive management strategies. Refining these variables is key to building a scalable model of successful habitat at landfills.

Making Trash Bloom encompasses both conservation and public outreach. Using the landfill plantings as public demonstration sites, and developing associated educational programming, is central to our model. As we’ve done in Shenandoah County, we’ll be holding educational programs for adults and children in Rappahannock and Fairfax, centered on the themes of native plants, pollinators, and wildlife.

We’re continuing to partner with the State Arboretum of Virginia (Blandy) on the technical side of Making Trash Bloom, as well as benefiting from the expertise of Ernst Seed, the Eastern US’s largest purveyor of native seeds and seed sponsor of the Rappahannock project. Our ever-expanding educational partnership with Mountain Vista Governor’s School ranges from on-site data collection to blogging (check out the Teens Go Green blog) to student choreography: the Rappahannock pilot plots will be hand-seeded, and the seed needs to be tamped down somehow, so our Party at the Landfill guests will be treated to a seeding dance choreographed and performed by MVGS! We hear it will be set to Beyoncé. Additional educational partnerships are currently under development with Fairfax County Public Schools and the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation. We don’t know yet if their students can dance.

Trash wouldn’t be blooming in either Rappahannock or Fairfax without the vision and passion of local grantmakers who’ve taken a leap of faith in an organization new to their regions. We’re deeply grateful to the PATH Foundation and the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation for their support of Making Trash Bloom Rappahannock, and to the Community Foundation for Northern Virginia for awarding its principal 2022 Environment Grant to Making Trash Bloom Fairfax. Inspired by CFNOVA’s example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Chesapeake Bay Trust have now committed to funding Fairfax’s Phase 2, which will be planted next spring.

Making Trash Bloom goes national

Save the dates for our seeding parties…