Residents can now recycle paper and cardboard in the same bin with their metal and plastics after the town signed a contract with a new recycling hauler, Waste Management of Billerica, in June. Glass will still be collected at the transfer station, but it can’t be mixed with other recyclables.
Glass is heavier than other recyclables (and thus more costly to haul) while also being more difficult to separate from other materials, so it’s worth very little in today’s recycling market, as explained in this 2015 Wall Street Journal article. Waste Management charges by the ton for picking up materials from the transfer station and then pays a rebate for non-glass recyclables, so the recycling rebate and the fee for removing glass will balance out to a small net gain for the town, according to Assistant Town Administrator Mary Day.
At its facilities in Billerica and elsewhere, Waste Management separates commingled materials using machinery including suction equipment, magnets and optical detectors. One items that poses problems is plastic grocery bags, however. “They kill the machine that does the separating,” said Day, noting that residents should recycle them in bins inside supermarkets and not at the transfer station.
Town officials made the change in recycling companies because the former vendor, Integrated Paper Recyclers, was not doing the job, Day said. That company sometimes did not pick up the full containers on time, meaning that the transfer station had to either close or require residents to combine materials they had previously separated, such as putting plastics and cans in the glass container, she said.
“We had no choice because it was happening so frequently,” Day said, adding that transfer station workers were often the target of complaints from irate residents as a result of the problem. When interviewing other potential vendors, town officials were impressed by Waste Management’s “unbelievable state-of-the-art facility… we were so pleased with what they had to offer us and their responsiveness,” she said.
Sometime in the next few weeks, the transfer station will also install new bins and a larger compactor. One reason for this is the increased volume of paper and cardboard, requiring a transfer station worker to stand by almost full-time to shove down the material and run the compactor frequently to keep up.
“It has gone from way more than just paper to a lot of cardboard with everybody buying from Amazon,” Day said.
This fall, officials hope to update the procedures for recycling CRTs (cathode ray tubes such as old TVs and computer monitors) and white goods such as washing machines. “We don’t really had any hard policy and that’s one of the things that’s costing the town a lot of money,” Day said. One possibility is limiting how often residents can bring such materials. “We’ll have to see what other towns are doing that makes sense.”
