conservation

Minute Man National Historical Park and nearby landmarks have been designated as one of America’s 11 most endangered historic places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The Trust chose MMHNP due to threat of private jet hangar expansion at nearby Hanscom Field, which would significantly increase the number of private jet flights along with noise and greenhouse gas emissions. The jets would use the runway that directly overflies Minute Man Park, Walden, Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, and historic homes in Concord, Lexington, Lincoln, and Bedford. Hanscom is the only airport in the country that abuts a national historic park and a national wildlife refuge.

The park and surrounding area designated by the Trust includes the site of the first battle of the American Revolution on April 19, 1775; the homesteads of the authors Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott; Walden Pond and Walden Woods, and properties connected with the Underground Railroad and Brister Freeman and Caesar Robbins, two enslaved men who were emancipated after their service in the Revolutionary War.

“Against the dire backdrop of our warming climate and the climate disasters that result, causing so much suffering for millions, it is utterly appalling to consider a massive development for luxury private jets in the midst of the landscape that inspired the founding of our democracy and the American environmental movement,” actor and activist Ashley Judd said at the May 1 announcement ceremony in Concord. “We must take responsibility for protecting both our historic sites and our planet by firmly opposing this completely senseless development.”

“Today’s announcement reminds us of the enduring responsibilities we bear: to preserve our national treasurers like Walden Pond and Walden Woods through vigilant advocacy and devoted stewardship. Without both, we face the very real possibility that these national treasures could be lost for future generations. Critical choices lie ahead. We must choose wisely by prioritizing what is essential for the preservation of the special places that inspire us, embody our history, reflect our values and define us as Americans,” said Don Henley, musician and board chair of the Walden Woods Project.

The Trust encourages residents to sign their petition urging Gov. Healey and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg them to stop expansion of Hanscom Field. 

The project’s draft environmental impact report and other documents can be found here. The public comment portal is here (project 16654, login/registration required). The deadline for comments on the DEIR has been extended to June 14, 2024.

The February 20 article headlined “My Turn: 100 seconds to a better planet” did not contain links in two places saying “click here.” The article has been updated, and the paragraphs explaining how to check which green energy plan you’re on(and how to upgrade to 100% Green) are reprinted below:

First, make sure you have your Eversource bill at hand. Then click here, fill out the form, and press “Submit.” Or call LGEC customer support at 844-651-8919 and tell them you want 100% Green. They will make the change for you. (It may take several billing cycles before the change takes effect.)

If you’re uncertain which option you’re in now, click here to see where the rate and supplier information is noted on your Eversource bill. Then find your February 2024 or a later bill to compare.

The Mass. Department of Public Utilities requires the town to publicize an announcement about the new prices for Lincoln Green Energy Choice. Following is the text of the announcement.

Beginning in January, prices for Lincoln Green Energy Choice, Lincoln’s electricity aggregation program, will decrease by more than 6 cents/kWh for all program participants. The new prices will take effect as the current electricity supply contract with First Point Power ends and a new, 24-month contract with First Point Power takes effect. Most participants will also receive more electricity from renewable sources and a price that is lower than Eversource’s winter residential Basic Service price, though future savings compared with Eversource cannot be guaranteed.

The new prices and associated renewable content for each option are as follows:

Lincoln Standard Green – Lowering to 16.093 cents/kWh. Participants in Standard Green already receive an additional 32% of their electricity from renewable sources, “additional” meaning above the minimum required by state law. With the new contract, that additional amount will increase to 38% in 2024 and 44% in 2025. Most participants are enrolled in Lincoln Standard Green.

Lincoln 100% Green – Lowering to 17.348 cents/kWh. This option will continue to provide 100% of participants’ electricity from renewable sources.

Lincoln Basic – Lowering to 14.631 cents/kWh. This option will continue to provide an additional 2% of participants’ electricity from renewable sources.

Lincoln prioritizes helping to build demand for new renewable energy projects on the New England grid. As a result, the additional renewable energy that is purchased for each program option, over and above the minimum amount required by state law, is from new renewable projects in the New England region (MA Class I RECs).

The new prices are designed to provide long-term stability and are fixed for 24 months, from January 2024 to January 2026. In addition, the Lincoln Green Energy Choice Standard Green and Lincoln Green Energy Choice Basic prices are below Eversource’s January 1 residential Basic Service price of 17.25 cents/kWh. However, Eversource’s Basic Service prices change and future prices are unknown. As a result, future savings compared with Eversource cannot be guaranteed.

Lincoln Green Energy Choice has a track record of providing measurable value to participants, including providing price protection during last winter’s volatile electricity market. Lincoln Green Energy Choice has saved participants more than $1.4 million since the program’s 2021 launch through September 2023. In addition, because all program participants buy more electricity generated from renewable sources than is required by law, Lincoln Green Energy Choice has helped the community to avoid more than 12 million pounds of CO2 emissions. This is equivalent to the emissions associated with more than 1,211 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles for a year.

No action is required for current Lincoln Green Energy Choice participants. All active program participants will automatically be enrolled into the new First Point Power contract with their January 2024 meter read. The new program price will first appear on February 2024 Eversource electric bills, and the electricity supplier will be listed as “Lincoln Green Energy Choice.”

Participants will be enrolled in the same program option they have in the current First Point Power contract. However, participants may choose a different program option or leave the program before the new First Point Power contract takes effect, and at any time in the future, with no penalty or fee.

To enroll, make changes to enrollment, or get more information, please visit the program website at LincolnGreenEnergyChoice.com or contact customer support with Lincoln’s program consultants at 1-844-651-8919. Large commercial accounts are subject to special terms and conditions.

The town is kicking off the summer review period of its draft Climate Action Plan at a virtual event on Thursday, June 29 from 7–8 p.m. Residents are invited to learn more about the plan and the strategies to reduce carbon emissions and increase the community’s resilience to climate change impacts (click here to register).

The plan — which was developed by Assistant Director of Planning and Land Use Jennifer Curtin and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council along the lines of other towns’ climate action plans — lists Lincoln’s climate action goals and groups strategies into six categories:

• Energy 
• Mobility 
• Built environment 
• Working land and natural resources 
• Water and solid waste 
• Social resilience  

More than 200 strategy ideas were received from community engagement activities during the spring that included workshops, focus groups and a survey. After public review this summer, the final draft will be submitted to the Select Board for approval in the fall.

When the plan was presented to the Select Board on June 26, board member Kim Bodnar was intrigued by one of the proposed strategies: establishing an “ambassador program” to help residents understand and access grants for weatherization, building energy retrofits, adoption of solar power, battery storage, etc. “Is it like a Geek Squad for green folks?” she asked. “That would be incredibly helpful — sometimes people just don’t know.”

“We heard from folks that they would rather hear [about steps they could take] from their neighbors rather than Mass Save or people who want to sell you things,” Curtin said. The ambassador program “is my #1 focus… it’s really impactful and not an expensive thing for the town to do.”

Board member Jim Hutchinson asked whether the town would need more staffing to carry out various elements of the plan, which will also involve extensive grant application writing. “We’re going to have to give some serious consideration to that when we have a real solid sense of priorities and timeline,” Town Administrator Tim Higgins replied.

“A lot of this stuff is kind of aspirational” and will involve more detailed feasibility studies, cost/benefit analyses and data gathering, Curtin added.

More information on the draft Climate Action Plan:

• MAPC summary presentation
• PowerPoint presentation to the Select Board
• Executive summary of the plan
• Full text of the plan

Editor’s note: This is a follow-up piece to the “Where Does It All Go?” series published in the Lincoln Squirrel in August 2022. Links can be found at the bottom of this article.

By Alice Waugh

Lincoln is doing its part by recycling and composting diligently, but there’s always room for improvement to meet the state’s ambitious goals for reducing solid waste disposal — trash, recyclables, and everything in between.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection’s 2030 Solid Waste Master Plan released in 2021 calls for reducing disposal statewide by 30% percent (from 5.7 million tons in 2018 to 4 million tons in 2030) by 2030 and sets a long-term goal of achieving a 90 percent reduction in disposal to 570,000 tons by 2050. To this end, MassDEP has been banning more items from the trash and encouraging composting, while recycling sorting facilities are working on reducing contamination and educating consumers about what and what not to recycle.

Trash and what goes into it

There’s a long list of items that are not allowed to go into the trash, including construction and demolition materials (asphalt pavement, brick, concrete, clean gypsum wallboard and wood) as well as tires, large appliances, lead acid batteries, metal, yard waste, and cathode ray tubes in addition to recyclables. In November 2022, that list of banned materials was expanded to include mattresses, textiles, and commercial food from facilities and organizations generating more than one-half ton of those materials per week (down from the limit of one ton per week imposed in 2014)

The largest category of waste sent to municipal waste combustors (a.k.a. MWCs, incinerators, or waste-to-energy plants) is organic material — mostly food waste. However, the share of those organics in the waste stream for WIN Waste Innovations (formerly Wheelabrator) in North Andover, Lincoln’s trash handler, dropped sharply from 35.6% of the waste stream in 2019 to 24.8%, according to the report for 2022. This is at least in part due to the availability of grants through MassDEP’s Sustainable Materials Recovery Program that helps pay for compost bins and implement programs.

Under an agreement with Black Earth Compost, Lincoln began accepting compost at the transfer station in 2019 (the company also does curbside pickup and lists what is and isn’t compostable). The amounts dropped off each month rose consistently year over year until the first quarter of 2023, when the transfer station accepted 12 tons of compost — down from 14.5 tons in the first quarter of 2022, according to the Department of Public Works.

The state is also working to reduce food waste from small businesses and residents by fostering more development of community and drop-off composting programs as well as efficient models for curbside food waste collection.

Years ago, transfer stations in Lincoln and other towns used to take construction and demolition debris as bulky waste for incineration, but that material is no longer acceptable in the municipal waste stream. Some of it (along with recyclables) was still sneaking into the bulky waste container near the metals container at the transfer station, but since the container became accessible only with the help of a DPW employee, the amount of unacceptable materials has dropped, the DPW reported.

On the other hand, the percentage of construction and demolition debris collected by Waste Innovations in North Andover has increased from 11.4% to 18.8% of the materials total from 2019 to 2022 for reasons that are unclear. The Construction & Demolition Recycling Association and MassDEP provide information on managing debris, including where to dispose of it.

The state monitors the loads sent to MWCs can levy fines on towns that include too many unacceptable items. In the past year, four municipalities — Arlington, Boston, Natick, and Quincy — have been warned though not fined by MassDEP for having recyclable cardboard in their trash, according to MassDEP spokesman Ed Coletta. Cambridge (mattress/box springs) and Watertown (mattresses and tires) were also warned.

Burning vs. burying

Back in the day, most garbage was sent to a landfill or burned in open fires, both of which had (and still have) drawbacks. Like many densely populated parts of the country, Massachusetts began running out of space for landfills, which also released greenhouse gases such as methane into the atmosphere, as well as other pollutants into the ground and water. MassDEP has closed all unlined landfills and requires the remaining few to close when they reach capacity. Most of the state’s trash now goes to MWCs via transfer stations or private haulers. Today it has only 16 active landfills, and three of those accept only ash and other waste left over from MWC combustion.

Those facilities are about half as energy-efficient as modern natural gas power plants, with an electrical efficiency of approximately 24% vs. 50%, Coletta said. “The electrical efficiency of a MWC is lower primarily due to the fuel type (i.e., solid waste) that has less energy content (for example, less carbon and greater water content) than natural gas,” he explained. Like landfills, MWCs emit pollutants, although they are regulated by MassDEP and the federal government to ensure they do not “pose significant risks to public health or the environment,” though the agency notes that it’s not possible to completely eliminate emissions from combustion.

As alternatives to incineration for nonrecyclable plastic, gasification and pyrolysis (heating in the absence of oxygen to produce hydrocarbons to make more plastic or fuel oil) are being explored, but there are challenging costs and drawbacks. Pyrolysis still produces carbon dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants, and it is energy-intensive, sometimes requiring even more energy than it yields. The mixture of different types of plastic and contaminants being pyrolyzed is also a problem. 

“There’s too many types,” said Jen Dell, a chemical engineer, in a 2022 Chemical Engineering News article. “There are too many additives. You can’t recycle them all together, and separating them out defies the second law of thermodynamics. It is just impossible to reorder all these plastics once they’ve been put into a curbside bin.” Finally, some also point out that pyrolysis does nothing to reduce dependence on plastics, since it only produces more plastic.

For cities and towns today, “the question of whether landfills or municipal waste combustion facilities is a complicated question – each has its pros and cons. Our focus in our 2030 Solid Waste Master Plan is to reduce the amount of waste that is disposed overall, whether it is disposed of at an in-state landfill, in-state combustion facility, or out-of-state landfill,” Coletta said.

In a welcome twist that was unforeseen when polluting landfills were filling up and closing, some capped landfills such as Lincoln’s are now being turned over as sites for solar panels. Lincoln has hired a firm to install a solar installation atop the landfill across from the transfer station that could eventually generate enough electricity to power all town-owned buildings excluding the schools.

Recycling

As always, the best approach to reducing overall waste is a combination of the “five Rs”: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rot. (“Refuse” means saying no to disposable single-use plastic, coffee cups, utensils, straws, shopping bags, food packaging, and anything else you could replace with a reusable or compostable option.) Even though it’s listed as #4, recycling — in particular, single-stream recycling — is probably the most familiar strategy.

As noted in the Lincoln Squirrel last year, Lincoln’s recycling rate (the proportion of recyclables diverted from the trash) since 2012 has averaged about 40%, which is slightly better than the statewide average of 33% but well below world-leading cities including San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles in the U.S., which recycle or divert about 80 percent of their waste from landfills and MWCs.

Lincoln sends its single-stream recycling to Waste Management in Billerica for sorting and sale. A group of residents from the Green Energy Committee and Mothers Out Front visited the facility in February 2023 to learn how the process works and made this two-minute video. But they still had some unanswered questions, so the Lincoln Squirrel talked to Chris Lucarelle, Waste Management’s Area Director for Recycling Operations. Here are his replies:

Is it correct to say that anything stamped with #1, #2 or #5 is recyclable?

We prefer that we say “plastic bottles, jars, tubs and lids” rather than numbers.

Can other household items made of plastic be recycled along with cans, bottles, etc.? For example, plastic toys/chairs/buckets, reusable plastic kitchenware?

Not kitchenware, but we do separate items like buckets and crates that are bales and sold as a bulky rigid plastic grade.

What happens to nonrecyclable plastic? Can it be sold for pyrolysis or some other use, or does it all get sent to the incinerator? 

We are working on solutions for those miscellaneous plastics but we’re not quite there yet.

How big a problem is contamination of recyclable plastics with nonrecyclable types or other things?

Because we sort all of our plastics optically, we are able to make bales of just PET or HDPE [#1 and #2] without contaminating the batch. To keep plastics out of the paper when sorting, we are now automating our paper lines with optical sorters to extract any plastic that found its way into the stream. Sometimes it’s usable flattened containers that can be recovered and sometimes it’s film and pouches that ends up with the residue.

Do you expect to be able to accept black plastic as a recyclable material any time soon?

Some of our facilities have the technology today to recover black plastic, but not all facilities yet.

Aside from “tanglers” (plastic bags, wire, rope, hoses, etc.) that jam the machines, what do you often see in the recycling stream that should not be there?

Small camping propane tanks and lithium ion batteries, both of which are a fire hazard.

What about small metal household items other than cans such as old saucepans, metal pipes, tools, or other small hardware?

This type of scrap metal tends to jam in our equipment or risks injury to our workers. Scrap metal should not be placed in a curbside bin.

Are empty plastic medicine bottles considered trash?

Yes — plastics smaller than two inches in any dimension should not go in the recycling bin. This includes loose plastic bottle caps,  which tend to fall through the equipment at recycling processing facilities (put caps back on bottles before recycling).

I hear that small Fancy Feast-type cat food cans should not be part of single stream recycling – why?

They are often lined with plastic.

Is shredded paper OK?

Many of our MRFs [materials recovery facilities] accept shredded paper from commercial sources as an independent stream. When it is placed in the single-stream bins, it ends up contaminating the glass.

(Belinda Gingrich, who was part of the tour by Lincolnites, also noted that shredded paper and small scraps “fly about like confetti. Any paper smaller than two inches on a side will most likely get lost in the system and end up in the trash containers that reside under the conveyor belts.”)

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More information about recycling:

• Recyclopedia (created by Recycle Smart MA, a program funded by MassDEP), where you can look up almost anything to find out whether you can put it in your recycling bin. For items that aren’t allowed, the site also suggests other means of disposal, such as Beyond the Bin.
• Recycling 101 from Waste Management, which sorts the recyclables from Lincoln and other area towns
• The Lincoln transfer station
• The “Where does it all go” series in the Lincoln Squirrel from 2022:
  • Part 1: Single-stream recycling
  • Part 2: Trash
  • Part 3: Recycling beyond single-stream
  • Part 4: Beyond the transfer station
  • Part 5: The 5 R’s, and some numbers

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