On April 4, the Brunswick Town Council received the long-awaited report and proposals from the town manager on the move to ecomaine, and unanimously approved both. They directed the town manager and his staff to proceed with signing the necessary contracts. If all goes according to plan, we should be working with ecomaine by the first of July. That was the hope last year, too, of course, but there is reason to be optimistic that this time it might really come off.
To get here, the town and the Solid Waste Subcommittee of the Recycling and Sustainability Committee made a detailed examination of seven separate scenarios for cost, feasibility, and overall savings in dollars and environmental terms. The clear winner there involves a swap with Casella, which sounds shaky, at first glance, but is really the best way to get ourselves into the remaining space in ecomaine’s trash capacity.
The way the swap works is that Casella will continue to pick up both our trash and our recyclables. They will then take both to their transfer station in West Bath, as they do now. Recyclables will go to the Casella processing facility in Lewiston to be processed and sold, as they are now. Trash will go to the PERC waste to energy plant in Orrington, or to the landfill at Juniper Ridge. That’s also the same as is happening now.
For Brunswick, a tonnage of material in both categories that is equal to what Casella picks up here will be delivered in our name to ecomaine from Casella’s transfer station in Westbrook. In addition, any contamination of the recyclables delivered in excess of the average being received by ecomaine will incur a penalty charge (or receive a lower rebate than cleaner material gets). Casella will be required to pay those penalties, but we get any rebates for cleaner recyclables. That ensures that our own efforts to do recycling properly, and without contamination, will not be wasted by having Casella deliver contaminated materials to ecomaine.
The immediate gains for this plan are that we lock in our spot in the ecomaine system for the next 10 years. We also save about $300,000 per year by not running back and forth to Portland every day with the packer trucks in which the materials are collected by Casella. That same reduction in road travel also saves a significant amount of air pollution that the trucks would otherwise generate. The trucks just go to West Bath, instead of Portland, and shut down for the day. In addition, it would require an additional truck to make all the stops, if the time required for the trips to Portland were removed from the time available to pick up the trash in the first place.
GLASS COLLECTION RETURNS TO BRUNSWICK
The other thing the Brunswick Town Council approved was to start collecting glass again. Since Casella is still our collection agent, I asked why that change was made. From what I’m told, the economics of the collection process for glass has changed. We stopped glass because we were being charged three times for it. Once to pick it up, again to sort it, and again to move and dispose of it at the landfill. It was not being recycled in any way. The swap arrangement means the extra charges will no longer be happening for recyclables taken to ecomaine, so we can again put the glass into the recycling bins. Because glass is so heavy, that will add a lot to our recycling tonnage, which will help us keep our costs low at ecomaine.
Crushed, mixed glass is very difficult to recycle. It’s difficult to handle, and has little residual value. At ecomaine, they collect the stuff in large piles, and essentially give it away to organizations that use it as aggregate in concrete or paving materials. It is also used, in substantial quantities, from what I’m told, in the making of decorative glass countertops.
So town policy is now to put the glass into the recycle bins again, but I will personally wait until the switch to ecomaine is completed.
The Recycle Bin is a weekly column on what to recycle, what not to recycle, and why, in Brunswick. The public is encouraged to submit questions by email to brunsrecycleinfo@gmail.com. Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee. This column is a product of his own research.
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