The Clean Team, Nantucket’s roadside trash haulers

Written by Caroline Mezzalingua

Photography by Kit Noble

Six tons of trash on the side of the road, in the parks and beaches every year. That’s not the roadside trash from a major city but from Nantucket, collected every year by Bill Connell’s Clean Team. “It’s exercising with a purpose,” Connell said. “The purpose is community enhancement, beautification and preservation.”

Today, some 545 people are on the Clean Team’s email list. They meet every Saturday for the better part of the year at a rotating list of locations. Fewer than a handful of members on the email list typically turn out, but in July and August, it’s not surprising to see several dozen people join, finding everything from vodka bottles to dirty needles, but more often construction debris and landscaping material lost from open-top hauling trucks. “Cover your loads” is a phrase Connell returns to often.

Between group cleanups and what Connell calls “adjunk” members who clean their own neighborhoods on their own time, the team scours the island. In addition to the tons of trash the Clean Team collects every year, even more litter is collected from the roadways, beaches and parks during the annual Nantucket Litter Derby each spring. Over the past eight years, the Litter Derby has hauled a whopping 65 tons of waste.

For Connell, the idea to clean Nantucket goes back to a bike trip in August 1965, when a friend, Joe Hart, proposed biking from Brooklyn to Nantucket to see every place Herman Melville described in Moby-Dick. They rode through Long Island; Mystic and New London, Connecticut; Block Island and Newport, Rhode Island; and New Bedford and Martha’s Vineyard before reaching Nantucket.

Fit enough for their budget, the two checked into the Star of the Sea Youth Hostel in Surfside, paying $3 a night for lodging, a discounted rate in exchange for work around the property. The next morning, while the other guests were cleaning the kitchen and toilets, Connell and Hart were assigned to clean up the remnants of an overnight pallet fire on the beach, picking up pieces of charred wood, bottles, nails, cans and wrappers of all sorts. It took them an hour. Connell still marks that date, August 22, 1965, as the inception of the Clean Team.

Connell was 25 that summer. At first, he cleaned up roadside trash on his own. But despite his efforts, there always seemed to be more trash. A friend told him, candidly: “It’s terrific what you’re doing; it’s a shame it’s so meaningless. You can’t clean up all of Nantucket.” It was then that Connell enlisted help, putting his name and home phone number in a classified ad, inviting anyone who wished to join him to pick up trash. Four people reached out, and that Saturday, they met at the corner of Milestone Road and Nobadeer Farm Road with gloves and bags, hauling five bags of trash to the landfill.

Connell has made those clean-ups a Saturday morning ritual for over 60 years, cleaning up bags of trash that fly off trucks headed to the dump, beer cans and cigarette butts in the Nantucket State Forest and the remnants of bonfires on the beaches. With an iconic booming voice, thick white hair and a neon yellow “Clean Team” shirt, Connell is unmistakable. His voice echoes through the pitch pines of the state forest, as he’s “talking trash” to a crew of volunteers at eight o’clock in the morning.

When asked why he does what he does, Connell said it’s because he loves the island, which he described as a “magical, faraway land combining history and natural beauty with a remarkable sense of community.” Still, he worries that the team’s visibility works against itself. When people are seeing the group out and about, they might assume the litter problem is being handled. But the problem persists. The effort hasn’t kept pace with decades of growth on Nantucket.

It reminds him of one of his first sources of inspiration. Years before he set foot on Nantucket, a high school teacher assigned him Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! One line stayed with him: “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”

“Isn’t that wonderful, that you can fall in love with a place and have a proprietary sense that you own it?” said Connell. “And if you own something, what do you do? You take care of it. You love it. You respect it.