Camryn Woods is a reporter with the Community News Service, part of the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.
COVENTRY — Vermont’s single landfill in Coventry receives hundreds of thousands of pounds of waste every year. Most of that amount is municipal waste — regular household and business trash like a Snicker’s wrapper or an old rocking chair.
In 2023 alone, a report by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation showed Vermonters generated 540,000 tons of municipal solid waste. That’s equivalent to the weight of 1.5 Empire State Buildings.
Vermont’s solid waste plan has a goal to prevent 50% of the state’s waste stream from entering the landfill by reducing, recycling, repairing and composting. The closest the state came to meeting that number was in 2024, when 41% was diverted, according to Josh Kelly, solid waste program manager of the Waste Management and Prevention Division at DEC.
In order to reach state goals, and connect Vermonters across the state, DEC created a new initiative called ReVT to be administered by Anne Bijur of the Solid Waste Division.
The goals of the initiative are twofold, said Bijur, who supervises the materials management section of the division.
“The first is to build this coalition around waste reduction, reuse and repair,” Bijur said. “The second is to create an open, inclusive network that supports practitioners and all Vermonters to participate.”
ReVT held its inaugural board meeting on May 13 over Microsoft Teams. The meeting was open to anyone interested in reuse and repair opportunities.
Forty-five participants logged on to learn from the program’s advisory committee and community presenters, according to its first newsletter. At the end, they were given the opportunity to engage in a 20-minute breakout group session to provide their feedback.
Presenters at the meeting included a Front Porch Forum representative, the owner of a secondhand craft store in Burlington and a member of the Addison County Solid Waste Management District, which hosts repair fairs in Addison County every year.
Susan Alexander, the program coordinator of ReVT, recognized the broad community that the initiative involved. It was this diversity, she said in the meeting, that would make ReVT a success.
“There’s a lot of different angles to this,” Alexander said in a later phone call. “There’s the people who are trying to make a living doing it. There’s the folks who are trying to preserve our planet and conserve resources. There’s people who love fixing things. There are people who love going to thrift shops.”
Through ReVT, Alexander hopes to amplify opportunities for reducing, reusing and repairing, cutting down on the amount of waste going to the Coventry landfill. These processes also conserve the natural resources used to make these products, Alexander said.
The program can also support a circular economy, Alexander said, where goods are recycled indefinitely, moving through many hands rather than ending up in the trash after the first use.
“Instead of buying something at the store, then it breaks and goes to the landfill,” Alexander said, “(ReVT) is going to keep things looping through their life cycle as many times as possible.”
The project is funded through a Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grant provided by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2023. Of that grant, almost $17,000 was allocated to ReVT’s initiatives. Though the money is guaranteed now, it is unclear whether further funding will be provided after the conclusion of the contract in August 2026, Kelly said.
Regardless of funds, Kelly, Bijur and Alexander hope that ReVT will become a movement with a lasting impact. Their ultimate goal is to build support toward a coalition similar to the Composting Association of Vermont, which hosts a conference every spring.
“Often there’s local solutions that can contribute to an economy,” Kelly said. “I just think people need that awareness to think about reuse repair first — not only for reducing waste, but for the people that it sustains.”
Arianna Soloway, who presented at the ReVT meeting, is one of those people. She started a secondhand art store and community art space last November. Her store, The Makery, is located on 388 Pine St. in Burlington.
“I’ve done a million different crafts over time and accumulated a lot of stuff for all of those different crafts,” Soloway said. “As I’ve gotten older … the more I find myself not being creative because I get hung up on the environmental issues of it.”
Soloway said that she was inspired to start The Makery from her job as the manager of Muscle Up Yarn in Shelburne, where customers would come in asking for places to distribute unused materials from late family members. Others would come in looking for more affordable crafting supplies.
After doing some research, Soloway was surprised to find that Burlington didn’t have a secondhand art store — and decided that she could change that.
“There was a point in my head I think where it went from, ‘I wish somebody else would do that,’ to, ‘What if somebody else does that before I do?’” Soloway said.
The Makery also provides ways for longtime artisans and prospective artists alike to bond over low-pressure crafter gatherings. “It’s so hard as an adult to try something new and to feel like, “Is this worth it?’” Soloway said. That’s why her “Craft and Sip” nights were born, along with other workshops.
Looking forward, ReVT plans to host more community meetings to provide space for discussion and feedback. They’re also committed to increasing the prominence of events like repair cafes and the visibility of local handypersons through statewide directories.
“We want (ReVT) to be driven by the community,” Alexander said. “We don’t want to tell them, ‘This is what we’re going to show you.’ We want people in that reuse and repair community to come to us and say, ‘Hey, we’d like to learn about this.’”
ReVT’s listserv currently reaches about 150 people. Members have access to the program’s newsletter, which highlights reuse and repair businesses, recaps previous meetings and provides space for individuals to voice their thoughts.
“I think more than anything, I’m just glad to be a part of the solution,” Soloway said.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the role of the Addison County Solid Waste Management District.
