Understanding How Public Recycling Programs Work

Compare public recycling initiatives in Silver Spring, Wheaton and Takoma Park.

Local Voices: Improving Your Soil, A Gilchrist Center Thanksgiving, Grade Placement

Wheaton Patch highlights star bloggers in its Local Voices section.

Have you ever explored the Local Voices section on Wheaton Patch's home page? This week we highlight some of the fantastic blogs written there by community members. Improving Your Soil "If we ever want to see cool, clean water flowing through Sligo Creek, we will have to stop treating our soil like dirt." Ed Murtagh, the chair of the Friends of Sligo Creek Stormwater Committee and a board member of GreenWheaton, writes about the importance of good soil for retaining water, improving drainage and filtering out harmful pollutants. Learn more about how to improve your soil. Friends of Immigrant Center Take Part in the Spirit of Thanksgiving The Charles Gilchrist Center for Cultural Diversity, an important resource center in Wheaton for …

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Volunteer in Wheaton for Community Service Day on Oct. 27

Volunteers are needed to recycle paper, help remove invasive weeds at Brookside Gardens and clean up around the Wheaton Library.

The last Saturday in October is Community Service Day in Montgomery County, and volunteers are needed for a variety of service projects on that day and in the week leading up to it. Here are a few volunteer opportunities in Wheaton: - Brookside Gardens seeks volunteers for invasive weed removal on Oct. 27 from 9-12 p.m. - GreenWheaton is holding a paper-shredding and recycling event at Westfield Wheaton in the parking lot near Target on Oct. 24 from 4-7p.m. - GreenWheaton is also coordinating a cleanup of the Wheaton Regional Library on Oct. 27 from 1-4 p.m. "Volunteers will help landscape, plant native plants, mulch beds and clear any trash from the area," according to the service project announcement on the Montgomery County Volunteer …

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Esther French

4:05 pm on Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Need a way to securely dispose of a hard drive? You can do so at the recycling event on Wednesday, thanks to the Rockville-based organization Project Reboot.   more ›

Event Spotlight: 3rd Annual Green Drinks

GreenWheaton is hosting its third annual green drinks happy hour at The Limerick Pub on July 12.

Understanding How the Smart Grid is Changing Electricity

Ed Murtagh, a member of GreenWheaton, blogs about electricity usage for Wheaton Patch's Local Voices section.

GreenWheaton Update: Gala Success and Grant Money

GreenWheaton meets on the fourth Tuesday of every month.

GreenWheaton Gala Celebrates First Year

The Big Green Bus, which runs on waste vegetable oil, will make an appearance.

GreenWheaton, an environmental organization in Wheaton that received its nonprofit status in June 2011, is celebrating its first anniversary Tuesday night at Brookside Gardens. GreenWheaton supporters who attend the fundraiser gala can mingle with GreenWheaton board members and "green" business vendors. And stopping by on its crosscountry tour will be the Big Green Bus, which runs completely on waste vegetable oil. The college students from Dartmouth who crew the bus will talk about sustainability, give tours, and offer family-friendly activities. The bus will also be parked outside the Department of Energy earlier in the day from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., for those who cannot come to the GreenWheaton gala. Want to stay updated with environmental…

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Explore Wheaton Rainscapes

Take a self-guided tour of rainscapes in Montgomery County this Saturday.

How much do you know about watersheds in Montgomery County? Part of protecting these watershed is reducing stormwater pollution, which is the goal of the Montgomery County RainScapes program. This Saturday, from 9 a.m. to noon, the program is offering a self-guided tour of different rainscapes around the county. The tour features landscaping projects on both public and private property that demonstrate how to help protect streams from runoff water pollution. Two stops on the RainScapes 2012 tour are in Wheaton: at the Wheaton Triangle and on Arcola Avenue. See the annotated map for more details about what to expect at each place. GreenWheaton, which will soon be celebrating its first anniversary, held its ribbon-cutting ceremony at the …

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Symposium at Brookside Highlights Agricultural Innovations

Green Matters: Urban Farming Pioneers was the third and final food-focused symposium at Brookside Gardens.

  A vertical farm might seem like something out of a science fiction story, but it was just another innovative agricultural concept presented at the Feb. 24 Green Matters Symposium at Brookside Gardens. The all-day symposium, third in a series focused on food, attracted speakers such as Kathleen Merrigan, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to address the 137 attendees on the theme of Urban Farming Pioneers and how to sustainably feed the world's population. Leslie McDermott, a spokesperson for Brookside Gardens who helped coordinate the event, called the symposium a “tremendous success.” Brookside has offered these symposiums for nine years, but McDermott said that this was the first time it also offered the symposium …

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Forest Buffer Around Mall at Stake in Sector Plan

Environmental groups say the Wheaton Sector Plan should include language that protects and expands a forest buffer between the Wheaton mall and neighborhoods.

Without protection, the five-acre green space between the Wheaton mall and its bordering neighborhoods could shrink and eventually disappear. This is why the Audubon Naturalist Society and other environmental groups say they are pushing to include language that preserves this buffer zone in the Wheaton Sector Plan, a document that will guide redevelopment decisions in Wheaton for at least the next decade. But the Montgomery County planning department strongly opposes this change. The five-acre buffer in question lies between Westfied’s southern and western property line and the Ring Road that encircles its large parking lot, and ranges in width from 30 to 200 feet. The Montgomery County Council deliberated the sector plan in a worksession …

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