Most area transfer stations are back to taking in all the recyclables they were prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Peterborough is phasing in metal recycling after suspending it for months, DPW Assistant Director Seth MacLean said on Monday. Other area transfer stations have already reopened their recycling programs, and some, like Wilton, never suspended them.
Prior to the pandemic, many transfer station employees were sorting plastic and aluminum by hand before sending them into the balers, Peterborough recycling manager Scott Bradford said. “You get splashed on 50 to 100 times a day on a good day,” he said, and that’s before the baler crushes the air out of all the containers and sends it throughout the room – a concern if, say, someone infected with COVID-19 had just been drinking out of one of them.
Employee and public health and safety remains first priority, MacLean said, “But we do have an operation to run that’s built on a revenue model. We have to work between those two circumstances,” he said, and ultimately decisions would need to fit in the recycling center’s current budget. Peterborough will start accepting comingled steel/tin and aluminum recyclables from residents starting Tuesday, Aug. 25, with a staggered schedule based on license plate designations to keep stored-up recyclables from overwhelming the facility. Plastics are still not being accepted for recycling, but the resumption of metal recycling ought to inform the next phase of “recycling normalization,” MacLean said. “We want to make sure we are prepared to safely handle an increase in volume of one type of recyclable at a time, and plastic will certainly be our biggest challenge given that it requires careful hand-sorting,” he said.
The Jaffrey transfer station is back to normal recycling after only being open for trash disposal for a while, supervisor Peachie Chalke said, and the station is being inundated with recyclables that residents held onto rather than throwing them out. Working at the station when it was closed down to a single lane of traffic had stressful moments when residents got impatient, Chalke said, “Most of the people were really good,” she said.
The shutdown was due to the transfer station’s two employees having to touch all the recyclables to sort them by hand and getting them into the baler. “The cardboard we have to touch the most,” she said, shoveling plastics and keeping aluminum cans somewhat separate. They’re still handling paper and cardboard by hand.
Are there concerns about picking up the virus? “I think about it as: if we’re going to get it, we’re going to get it,” she said.
Transfer stations at Francestown and Hancock reopened quickly. Francestown has social distancing spaces delineated and Hancock has a new cover on its glass container – but only to cut down on costs associated with contaminated glass, Town Administrator Jonathan Coyne said.
The Wilton transfer station never had to stop accepting any kind of recyclable, manager Carol Burgess said, and the changes in layout and procedure they made to protect staff and visitors during the pandemic are actually working well enough to keep indefinitely. There’s more space than ever for people to drop off recyclables, she said. Workers wear latex gloves under their cloth gloves, and their baling system minimizes touching, she said.
The station stopped accepting household items for swapping, but Burgess said she had considered halting that prior to the pandemic since so many visitors were leaving junk, like moldy books and broken glass, rather than reusable goods. Burgess said she hopes that eventually the facility can support a building just for swapping household items, staffed by volunteers.
Disposal of kitchen trash doubled during the pandemic, Burgess said, and they had to do additional hauls for demolition waste too, as residents worked on cleanouts and renovations while they were stuck at home. “We capitalized on that by not closing the recycling down,” she said.
“Because other people were not recycling, we got the best prices we got in quite a while,” she said, although prices are coming down again as other stations reopen.
Prices for newspaper and cardboard skyrocketed in the first couple months of the pandemic, Bradford said, and newspaper prices remain at $75 a ton, up from $15 at the start of the year. Scrap metal and mixed paper prices remain low from tariffs and policies predating the pandemic, Bradford said. Demand for plastics is low since low oil prices favor the manufacture of virgin material, he said.
“Everybody wants to recycle,” he said. Recyclables have been going to a waste-to-energy incinerator in Penacook with the trash while the transfer station’s been closed, Bradford said.
Peterborough is hiring for a 10 hour a week, on call position at the transfer station to assist when any of the three full-time staff have to take a day off, Maclean said, and that the facility requires the same amount of maintenance regardless of whether recyclables are being sorted, plus someone dedicated to paying attention to parking and social distancing. “There’s never a shortage of work to do,” he said.