A new study found that 20% of what Granite Staters throw in the trash is recyclable. Those materials are also worth a lot of money – roughly $23 million. And these are the kinds of things commonly included in recycling programs, like newspapers, cans and plastic water bottles.
In Keene, 80% of what people bring to the dump is trash that ends up in a landfill, and those bags also often have recycling inside.
Duncan Watson is the head of Keene’s recycling center and transfer station. Even though he’s proud of his work, he’ll let you call it the dump.
“I’ve surrendered to it,” he said. “I don’t smell trash, I smell money. Waste is a big business.”.
Trash disposal and recycling bring in some serious cash. The Keene dump pays for itself by charging people who bring trash to the facility, and the recycling center there also brings money in by selling the cardboard, cans, bottles and more.
Inside the recycling center building there’s a long conveyor belt where employees stand, sorting the recycling that comes from Keene’s curbside pick up.
What can be recycled goes into different piles of paper and plastic, and a machine with a magnet takes care of some metals, pulling them off the belt into another pile. What can’t be recycled is tossed out.
“You'll see that there's a bin there that's collecting all the things that people put in the recycling bin that are either contaminated in some way,” Watson shouted over the din of the conveyer belt and recycling being flung in different directions. “So maybe a peanut butter jar that people didn't rinse the peanut butter out [of] or an item that we don't accept just because it's an off-spec plastic or some other material that we don't currently recycle.”
Watson can’t sell materials that are dirty to vendors, so they have to be tossed.
Outside the recycling center is the transfer station area where garbage trucks line up, waiting to dump their trash. Two excavators pick up the garbage with the claw, swinging it into a large open trailer.
“We get about 26 tons for every one of those trailers that's loaded out,” Watson said. “And we'll do several of those every single day.”
Trash disposal is what brings in the most money to Watson’s facility. But the dump will also have to pay for these tons of garbage to be dropped off at Turnkey Landfill in Rochester. There is a lot of cardboard in the trash heaps, and Watson said recycling gets in the transfer station’s trash piles because it was brought there in one mixed container.
“If people had a way of separating it out then, then it could have been recycled through our process,” Watson said.
He isn’t surprised by all the recycling at the transfer station, but he said it takes too much time for his employees to regularly sift through the trash.
“If you actually go in there and stopped everything, started picking through it,” Watson said, pointing to the transfer station, “You'd be surprised at the amount of recycling that goes through our transfer station on a daily basis.”
Michael Nork is with the state’s department of environment services. He worked on the state’s Waste Characterization Study, which essentially audited the trash Granite Staters were sending to landfills.
He says New Hampshire doesn’t require people to recycle so they don’t have to if they don’t want to. Also, not everyone can do it easily, even if they want to recycle.
“Take, for example, apartment buildings. Oftentimes those kinds of housing situations don't have readily available recycling access,” Nork said. “The landlord might provide a dumpster for trash, but not necessarily an additional dumpster for mixed recycling or something like that.”
If people still want to recycle in these situations, they have to go to the local transfer station. If it’s not convenient, they might just throw their recycling in the garbage.
And while recycling makes money for towns and cities, it can be costly for a business. Some have to pay every time a truck picks up their trash from a dumpster. If they recycled, they might need to pay for a second dumpster.
“This happens a lot with smaller businesses, Nork said. “They may not have a lot of resources so they're looking to figure out what's the most economical for them. And sometimes recycling doesn't fit into that picture.”
Duncan Watson hopes there will be investments in recycling infrastructure that will eventually allow people to dispose of everything in one dumpster and then get sorted out for recycling.
Michael Nork said he wasn’t aware of a place in the region that does whole waste stream disposal like that, but there are single stream recycling facilities like ecomaine in Maine that can recycle even more things than many municipal dumps accept. They use technology like lasers to identify different types of plastics and air jets to push objects into sorting piles.
But these are expensive and ambitious facilities, and Watson is retiring soon so he likely won’t see those big investments happen during his career in New Hampshire.
At the transfer station, he reflects on seeing so many potentially recyclable things heading to Rochester’s landfill.
“Of course it's bothersome,” he said. “I'm into resource conservation, and I think we can do better.”
For now, the heaps of cardboard and other materials in the transfer station are heading to Rochester.
