With the Concord trash co-operative having bailed out of its years-long single-stream recycling (SSR) plans last year, the Andover Board of Selectmen and Transfer Station Supervisor Reggie Roy have been hard at work trying to find another solution that will be right for Andover. In the coming weeks, you should begin to see the fruits of their labors at the Transfer Station.
Many of the final details are still being worked out, but the broad outlines are becoming clear. When I spoke to Reggie in mid-June, he was collecting a few final proposals to put in front of the Selectmen. His hope was that with all the figures in front of them, they could make a decision and have him start implementing changes by mid-July.
Here’s what Reggie was able to tell me in mid-June:
Double-Stream Recycling
We almost certainly won’t have a classic SSR setup, for one simple reason: it doesn’t make sense to pay to move glass, which is very heavy, out of town. Instead, the plan is to collect recyclable glass separately; stockpile it at the Transfer Station; and when the pile is big enough, crush it to be used as road-building material.
Reggie has already implemented this glass recycling plan by putting a 1-yard container (a second one is due soon) next to the Recycling Building. That’s where recyclable glass goes now. The container is small so that the Bobcat can lift it even when it’s full of glass and tote it to the growing glass pile.
Compact or Open?
That leaves the question of what to do with the rest of Andover’s recyclables – paper, paperboard, cardboard, aluminum, metal, and plastics #1 through #7. Reggie, who was a purchasing agent for 28 years and loves digging through numbers and comparing costs and benefits, has been developing detailed quotes on two different alternatives: an open container, much like the current Dumpster Depot paper/paperboard container; or a large, closed container with a compactor built into it.
Whichever of the two alternatives the Board of Selectmen ultimately chooses, it will likely be for financial reasons, because for Transfer Station “customers,” the two choices are essentially identical. In each case, we’ll put our trash in the hopper, our glass in the small glass containers, and all our other recyclables in a third spot – either an open container, or a closed container with a compactor built in.
Analyzing the costs of these two potential almost-SSR solutions is very complex. Reggie is getting cost quotes for:
- Installing a closed container next to the Transfer Station building and wiring its three-phase electric compactor
- Renting whichever container we settle on
- Hauling a container and about three tons of recyclables somewhere every week
- Tipping fees at whatever SSR facility we haul it to – the current candidates are in Hooksett, Belmont, and White River Junction. The preliminary numbers suggest that the tipping fee for our recyclables may be only about a third of what we pay to tip trash into the Penacook incinerator.
Making the Numbers Work
Even with all of Reggie’s advance number work, the Board of Selectmen will still have a tough financial decision to make. On the one hand, tipping at a third the rate of Penacook sounds good. On the other hand, we’ll lose the revenue we currently make from selling segregated recyclables like aluminum ourselves.
Back on the first hand, with one or both of our old balers threatening to soon become scrap metal themselves, we can avoid significant future expense to repair or replace the balers if we quit segregating and baling recyclables to sell.
Finally, there’s the potential savings on the trash side, if the new recycling scheme reduces Andover’s trash hauling and trash tipping costs. But how big will those savings be?
Enforcement at the Transfer Station
Recyclables aren’t the only thing changing at the Transfer Station. Another new thing is the security camera that Reggie currently uses to keep an eye on the trash hopper, the metal container, and the Construction and Demolition container. The camera records video even when no one’s in the Transfer Station building.
The camera could become an even more important tool when all our recyclables (except glass) start going into a single container. There will be big fines imposed on Andover if we should send a recyclable container to be processed and trash is discovered among the recyclables, so having digital evidence of everything that goes into the hopper will be important.