conservation

(Editor’s note: this story was updated on August 8, 2022.)

By Alice Waugh

Before there was a transfer station and before most people had heard of recycling, Lincolnites either burned their garbage in their back yard or brought it to the landfill, a.k.a. the town dump. The grassy hill with white gas vent pipes on your right as you enter the transfer station is all you can see of Lincoln’s landfill since it was closed in 1986 and capped in 1990. 

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Also in this series:

• Part 5: The 5 R’s, and some numbers
• Part 4: Recycling beyond the transfer station
• Part 3: Recycling beyond single-stream
• Part 1: Single-stream recycling

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The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) introduced its first bans on landfilling and combustion of easy-to-recycle and toxic materials in 1990. More waste bans have been added over time, so there’s now a growing list of things that aren’t allowed in municipal solid waste (MSW), otherwise known as trash.

Lincoln’s transfer station has two trash dropoff containers: the compactor next to the singe-stream recycling bin, and the one across from the new swap shed where you can toss larger items directly from your vehicle. That container used to be called the “commercial hopper,” DPW Office Manager Susan Donaldson said. The town no longer accepts commercial or construction waste; now everything in there goes to the same place as the regular trash.

There are some changes on the horizon for trash at the transfer station. The DPW is awaiting delivery of the new compactor and hopes to have it installed by the end of the summer. 

Also, the so-called commercial hopper will be locked all the time, so residents will have to ask an attendant to open it when they want to drop items inside. “You’re not going to be able to back up and throw anything and everything into it any more,” Donaldson said. That move is an attempt to reduce trash “contamination” — meaning prohibited items that were thrown into the trash and should be recycled or disposed of in some other manner instead. 

This is actually a bigger problem than the reverse (too many nonrecyclable items contaminating the recycling bins). The town has been getting warnings from WM (Waste Management), which picks up the transfer station’s trash and takes it to a waste-to-energy (WTE) facility operated by Wheelabrator in North Andover, one of seven in the state. Companies can refuse to accept MSW loads that contain more than 30% contaminants — meaning not food or chemicals, but rather items that aren’t allowed in the trash any more. 

Because the trash from Lincoln’s two current containers are brought in separately, it’s been easy to see that most of Lincoln’s trash contamination is coming from the gated container rather than the trash compactor next to the single-stream recycling bin. Lincoln was also fined about a year ago after someone threw tires in that bin. Tires are not accepted any place at the transfer station and must be recycled by a service station.

So what happens to the trash?

When the trash is burned in Wheelabrator’s WTE facility, it yields electricity and heat but also some air pollution in the form of toxic chemicals. The federal government requires advanced pollution control equipment such as scrubber systems that reduce but not eliminate emissions. Each WTE facility in Massachusetts has to submit an emissions control plan as well as a report on the composition of the trash it takes in (click here for the facility’s latest report).

In 2019 (the last year for which a report is available), the largest category of trash at Wheelabrator in North Andover was organic material, which includes food waste, branches, stumps, smaller yard waste, and manure. Because of its relatively high moisture content, food waste takes more energy to burn than it yields, and it’s also one of the heavier components of household waste, which is a financial issue since the town pays by the ton for trash hauling. However, the transfer station has accepted compostable material since 2019.

Anywhere from 10-25% of incinerated trash winds up as solid bottom ash. Wheelabrator takes it to the Peabody Monofill Associates Ash Landfill, which accepts ash from several waste-to-energy facilities in the northeast United States. (Researchers are also investigating ways of extracting metals and minerals from bottom ash, or using it in making concrete or as a road base.)

As of 2020, Peabody was one of only 19 landfills still in operation in Massachusetts; another 942 MSW landfills and dumping grounds have been closed over the years, and most are or will be capped, or covered to minimize the percolation of stormwater through the buried trash and into groundwater and wetlands. 

Though there are a lot fewer landfills nationwide than there once were, they still emit carbon dioxide and methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Landfills accounted for about 15% of methane emissions in the U.S. in 2020, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which notes that methane emissions from landfills that year were roughly equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from about 20.3 million passenger vehicles driven for one year. As of 2022, there were 13 landfills in the state that are current or potential candidates for the EPA’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program that aims to harvest landfill gas for energy, but Lincoln’s is not one of them.

Not allowed in Massachusetts trash:

• Asphalt pavement, brick and concrete
• Cathode ray tubes
• Clean gypsum wallboard
• Commercial food material (lower threshold effective November 1, 2022)
• Ferrous and non-ferrous metals
• Glass and metal containers
• Lead acid batteries
• Leaves and yard waste
• Mattresses (effective November 1, 2022)
• Recyclable paper, cardboard, and paperboard
• Single-resin narrow-necked plastic containers (click here to see what becomes of Lincoln’s recycled plastics)
• Textiles (effective November 1, 2022)
• Treated and untreated wood and wood waste (banned from landfills only)
• White goods (large appliances)
• Whole tires (banned from landfills only; shredded tires acceptable)

Coming soon: Articles about what happens to these other recyclables — and what to do about stuff that the transfer station doesn’t accept.

By Alice Waugh

Lincolnites are pretty conscientious about trying to recycle, but contamination is a problem here and everywhere else. Through carelessness or misunderstanding, people sometimes throw things that ought to be recycled into the trash, and throw trash into their recycling bin. In this series of articles, the Lincoln Squirrel will look at what happens to everything that gets dropped off at the transfer station as well as some tips on how to recycle more effectively.

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Also in this series:

• Part 2: Trash
• Part 3: Recycling beyond single-stream
• Part 4: Recycling beyond the transfer station
• Part 5: The 5 R’s, and some numbers

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Like many towns, Lincoln’s transfer station accepts single-stream recycling in a bin where people can toss paper and junk mail, cardboard, metal cans, plastic bottles, clean aluminum foil, and some plastic food and beverage containers. 

But then what happens to all that stuff after it leaves town? Waste Management (WM) picks up the roll-off containers of recyclables and takes them to its materials recovery facility (MRF) in Billerica, where everything is dumped onto a tipping floor. The commingled items are then loaded into an elaborate multi-step sorting machine that plucks out different materials at various points. As the items go by on a conveyor belt, human operators also pick out as much nonrecyclable material as they can. See videos of MRFs in action here and here.

Mixed paper and cardboard are easily recyclable and can be made into new cardboard, paper, paper napkins, etc. WM sells most of these materials to Pratt Industries and Westrock, according to Chris Lucarelle, Waste Management’s Area Director for Recycling Operations. Glass gets crushed and made into new glass products as well as fiberglass insulation. Metal cans meet a similar fate.

The biggest issue, of course, is plastic. Before 2018, MRFs sold much of America’s recyclables to China, which used them as raw materials for its growing industrial base but which also led to pollution in that country. But in 2018, China stopped accepting most so-called recyclables from North American and Europe as part of Operation National Sword because the loads were contaminated with too much nonrecyclable material.

As a result, a lot of plastic that was supposedly recycled by Americans goes into landfills and incinerators in the U.S. or is shipped to developing countries without the capacity to properly process it, which in turn results in more pollution of land, sea, and air worldwide (see “Reckoning with the U.S. Role in Global Ocean Plastic Waste,” a 2022 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine). 

Recycling plastic is especially problematic because there are so many variations in chemical composition, color, and transparency and many of these items can’t be mixed even after they’re separated from glass, metal, paper, etc. And it’s often too expensive to sort all these types of plastic, especially since it’s usually cheaper to make new plastic rather than use recycled plastic. Also, many well-intentioned residents engage in “wishcycling” — putting nonrecyclable items in their recycling bin and thus contaminating the load, as noted in this 2019 WBUR piece.

There’s a lot of understandable confusion when people try to figure out what plastics can and can’t be recycled. For example, single-use plastic cold drink cups can be recycled, but not their lids or straws. Black plastic takeout containers can’t be recycled, but their clear lids can. And many plastic items actually contain two or more types of plastic, so they’re also not recyclable. The days are gone when you could look at the number inside the triangle on the bottom of a container and immediately tell if it’s recyclable. 

Plastic items are labeled with a resin identification number inside a triangular recycling logo that indicates how the plastic was made. However, the recycling logo is deceptive. Just because a package or bottle has a number or recycling symbol doesn’t mean it’s recyclable. Instead, it indicates the molecular structure of the plastic, which is used to categorize what can and can’t be recycled. Plastics labeled #3, #4, #6 and #7 are not recyclable, according to the Conservation Law Foundation (see chart).

Some argue that recycling plastic is almost hopeless because of this sorting issue and because disposable plastic is relatively cheap to make as well as sturdy and sanitary. By extending the shelf life of food, plastic packaging actually reduces food waste, which comprises a large portion of household trash (see the “Saving Food” chart in “The Cost of Plastic Packaging”). Composting goes a long way toward reducing the amount of trash that has to be incinerated.

New uses for recycled plastic

However, the market for recycled plastics is slowly growing, due in part to increasing pressure for manufacturers to use more post-consumer resin (PCR) in their products. WM has some of its recycled plastic made into residential bins for its own use (EcoCarts).

None of the plastics from Lincoln that wind up in WM’s Billerica facility are sold overseas, according to Lucarelle. “National Sword proved to be a good thing for U.S. recyclers and we have seen a lot of growth in the domestic market,” he said.

Many plastic bottles are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is often marked with the #1 symbol. One of the largest purchasers of WM’s PET is Unifi, which uses the plastic to create a textile fiber to make new products such as shoes, clothing and bags. Work clothing made from this fiber is now available to WM employees. WM also sells some of its HDPE and PP (high-density polyethylene and polypropylene, often marked as #2 and #5) to KW Plastics in Troy, Ala., which claims to be the world’s largest plastics recycler and resin supplier for those materials. 

State governments are also working to encourage more plastic conservation and recycling by industry. California now requires certain food service facilities to serve customers with packaging that is either reusable, recyclable, or compostable. Last year, Maine became the first state to require producers of packaged goods sold in the state to pay for maintaining and expanding municipal recycling programs — a so-called extended producer responsibility (EPR) law.

Burn, baby, burn

Other ways to dispose of plastic are traditional waste-to-energy incineration and pyrolysis, where mixed plastic is heated in a low-oxygen environment so it breaks into shorter-chain hydrocarbons that can then be used to make fuels and chemical feedstocks that can be fashioned back into polymers, creating a closed loop, according to Chemical and Engineering News (“Should plastics be a source of energy?”). However, as the article notes, waste-to-energy plants can produce only the amount of energy per day that they were designed to. Plastics have a higher energy content than most trash, so if the facility processes more plastics, it has to take in less waste overall.

Many multinational companies are partnering with cement manufacturers to burn unrecycled plastic waste in cement kilns, which operate at a very high temperature. Cement factories have traditionally burned coal, which is a major greenhouse gas producer. Plastic and trash are far cheaper fuel source, but the factories still cause a lot of air pollution, especially in countries where emissions regulations are inadequate or not enforced.

And the bigger problem remains. Less than 10% of all the plastic ever made has been recycled, mostly because it’s too costly to collect and sort. Plastic production, meanwhile, is projected to double within 20 years, according to Reuters. 

What you can and can’t recycle in Lincoln

Back here in Lincoln, how does an environmentally conscious resident know what’s recyclable? Recycle Smart MA (a program funded by the Massachusetts DEP) has an excellent Recyclopedia where you can quickly look up hundreds of different items. Waste Management also has a Recycling 101 website. A general rule of thumb: if it isn’t a container — or if you’re in doubt at all — put it in the trash.

Here are a few of the things that many people “wishcycle” that should not go into the single-stream container:

• Single-use plastic drink lids, cutlery, straws
• Polystyrene “to go” containers
• Waxed cardboard milk/juice containers with plastic screw caps
• Frozen food boxes (they also contain wax)
• Paper cold drink cups with a wax coating
• Paper coffee cups and their lids
• Colored plastic cold cups (clear ones are OK)
• Plastic food envelopes for snacks, drink pouches, etc.
• Cardboard food canisters with metal rims containing nuts, chips, etc.
• Black plastic takeout containers (though their clear lids are OK). Why? MRFs sort plastics by bouncing a beam of light off them. Since black plastic absorbs light, it can’t be sorted and goes straight to the incinerator.
• Any kind of plastic bag, wrap or film
• Padded paper mailing envelopes
• Coat hangers, wires, tubing, etc. (these items, along with plastic bags, can tangle the sorting machinery)
• Screws, nuts, bolts, tools, etc.
• Larger metal or plastic objects such as toys, appliances, etc.
• Styrofoam molded package insulation or packing peanuts
• Rigid plastic form-molded packaging (sometimes glued to a cardboard backing)
• Prescription medicine bottles
• Anything contaminated with food

Lincoln has gone to Stage 4 of watering restriction measures, meaning that all outdoor watering except for once-weekly drip irrigation and limited hand watering is banned until further notice. 

The move comes just days after a July 17 announcement that the town had gone to Stage 3 restrictions (watering allowed once a week). Since then, Massachusetts has experienced a heat wave, and no rain is in sight for the immediate future.

Lincoln follows guidelines set out by Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, which declared a “significant” drought on July 12 and a “critical” drought on July 21 in northeastern and central Massachusetts. Those guidelines ask residents to minimize overall water use (both town and well water, which draws from the same aquifer) and stop all non-essential outdoor watering, which means any watering that’s not required for health or safety reasons, food production livestock maintenance, or to meet the core functions of a business.

“For the time being, the Water Department is allowing hand watering by hose of personal vegetable gardens and watering by bucket or watering can of non-vegetable plantings. Using water from rain barrels or excess water from household activities is preferred,” Water Commission Chair Ruth Ann Hendrickson said on July 26.

Water Department staff will drive around town in the early mornings to check for water sprinklers in use and will leave warning cards for homes that are in violation. Some residents have automatic systems that they forget to adjust, or can’t right away because they’re away on vacation.

The town’s water use restriction bylaw mandates a $50 fine for the first violation and $100 for each subsequent violation. However, fines will not be assessed right away. “People need time to hear about it and adjust to it,” Hendrickson said.

The Water Commission plans to meet on Friday, July 29 at 1 p.m. to discuss the town’s drought response and to take a detailed look at the town’s water withdrawal permit and other sources of information “to see what wiggle room we have,” she added.

Since the Stage 4 status was announced on LincolnTalk on July 24, residents have offered several creative tips for water conservation, such as outdoor watering using water from pasta boiling, salad spinners, dehumidifiers, air conditioners, sump pumps, and showers (caught in a bucket while waiting for the water to get hot).

The last time the area experienced a “critical” drought was in August 2016, when area pond and reservoir levels were extremely low. Lincoln’s watering restriction stages have gotten somewhat more stringent since then.

More information:

• Indoor water conservation
• Outdoor water conservation
• FAQ on private wells (page 96 of the state Drought Management Plan)

	Stage 1	Stage 2	Stage 3	Stage 4
Hand-held watering	Allowed 6pm–9am	Allowed 7pm–7am	Allowed 7pm–7am	Allowed 7pm–7am
Above-ground/ in-ground sprinklers	Allowed 7pm–7am	• Even house #s: Tues & Sat • Odd house #s Wed & Sun	• Even house #s: Sat only • Odd house #s: Sun only	Not allowed
Soaker hoses	Allowed any time	2 days a week	1 day a week	Not allowed
Drip irrigation	Allowed any time	2 days a week	1 day a week	1 day a week
New lawns	Allowed any time	June & Sept. only: 20 days of daily watering, then 2 days a week, 7pm–7am	June & Sept. only: 20 days of daily watering, then 1 day a week, 7pm–7am	Not allowed
Washing vehicles	Allowed any time	Commercial services only	Commercial services only	Commercial services only
Washing buildings, pavement	Allowed any time	Not allowed	Not allowed	Not allowed
Swimming pools, hot tubs, spas, Jacuzzis	Allowed any time	One fill per season for new or repaired equipment	Topping off only (3" per month)	Topping off or refill not allowed
Car wash fundraisers	Allowed any time	Allowed any time	Not allowed	Not allowed
Games or toys with continuous water	Allowed any time	Allowed any time (30 mins/day) on specified day (see row #2)	Allowed any time (30 mins/day) on specified day (see row #2)	Not allowed

The headline for the May 15 News Acorns item “Bench honoring Beaver Pond land donor is dedicated” was misleading. The stone seat given by the Garden Club was to honor all people who have been active in conservation in Lincoln over the years, not just land donor Jean Preston. The original headline has been updated.