Trash Talk; Cutting Costs at the Transfer Station

Michelle Lampro, the supervisor at the Washington Transfer Station, has been working with the town’s refuse and recycling long enough to have seen kids that came in car seats now headed to college. For many of us, the Transfer Station is where we run into friends and chat, a de-facto town center sustained by Michelle’s warm welcome—as long as you’re putting everything in its right place.

Now, as with most things, the costs associated with our town center will be going up, and there may be ways we can help keep them in line. One change is the closing of the Hubbard Street Incinerator in Pittsfield; Casella Waste Management will turn the old plant into a transfer station, trucking refuse to a landfill. Lampro doesn’t know when the facility will reopen.

“When we were burning things,” she says, “it was clear what you could burn and what they did not want to burn. Everything else went into the construction waste. We tried to burn as much as we could, rather than having things sit in a landfill. Now both containers are basically going to a landfill.”

The refuse container that once headed to Hubbard Street now goes to the County Waste B3 Transfer Station in Colonie, NY. Michelle explains that the shipping charge will impact the town because Craig Willis now has to truck it to New York; he is driving further, plus the cost of diesel fuel has risen from $2.85 a gallon to $3.60. The recyclables go in the opposite direction, to Springfield.

Then there’s the construction waste. “We still put sofas and sheetrock and roof shingles in the construction bin, and that one goes to the recycling center at Lenox Valley Waste (LVW), in Lenoxdale. They sort it: They pull out metal and tires and mattresses. Then they charge us for separate items on top of the tonnage fee.” When it comes to tires, LVW will only accept them if they are cut into quarters. “If you use a sawsall and cut them into four pieces, we can put them in the compacter or into construction waste.”

As of November 2022, MassEPA has banned disposal of textiles and mattresses. “They don’t want mattresses in the waste stream,” Michelle explains, “they want them to be recycled. The only recycling centers are on the east coast, so we need to pay someone to bring them out there. And they won’t accept any dirty mattresses—no mold, no mouse droppings. LVW will charge us $125 a mattress for anything that goes to them. They are charging us the same for a crib mattress as a king mattress.”

Michelle estimates that residents bring about a dozen mattresses to the transfer station in a year. After speaking with her counterpart in Dalton, she got a mattress-container vendor referral. As it turns out, even though there were grants available for towns to procure a container, it’s a moot point for Washington. “Given the size of our town, he said wouldn’t want to have a contract with us because it would take five years to fill a container. He suggested we contact the town of Dalton to bring our mattresses there.” It’s possible that Dalton or another town might want to work with Washington as it would expedite their filling a container. Meanwhile, residents can try to avoid a hefty disposal fee when purchasing new mattresses—ask the company you buy it from to take your old one.

When it comes to cardboard, Washington residents are filling containers faster than ever. “I can’t even describe the boxes—the Amazon boxes,” Michelle says. “Everyone is shopping on line; they are even buying food online. We used to ship our cardboard container six times a year. During the pandemic it’s been every month, and it’s still every month. Twice as much cardboard as before, and it hasn’t slowed down.

“If people broke down all their boxes, we could fit a lot more in the container,” Michelle says. She, Jane and André spend a lot of their time reshuffling the cardboard and the boxes—and over the course of many years, they’ve saved the town enough by consolidating all those boxes to buy a new container.

They also spend a lot of their time pulling things out of the can and bottle bin that should not be there. “Any container that had car fluid in it can’t go in with the recyclables,” she says, pointing to the signs. “I’d encourage people to read the signs—the no’s are more important than the yeses: No oil containers, no kerosene, no flower pots, no rigid plastic toys, no black plastic (it melts at a different temperature). We’re also pulling out the five-cent returns a lot.”

Then there are the recyclables that residents throw in to the compactor. “You can hear the bottles and cans and glass,” Michelle says. “I am tempted to stop them mid-throw. (I body blocked one guy—I wouldn’t let him put it in the compacter. He said, I don’t believe in that bs, and I said, I’m not letting you go there.) If they put it in the recycling bin, we would get money instead of having to pay for it.”

How much? Michelle figures that an average compactor bin is ten tons, and it costs the town $83 a ton, delivered. She guesses about one-sixth of that material is recyclables. “Those recyclables are getting compacted. If they were tossed into the recyclables bin with the other bottles and cans, they would not be compacted.

“The money back on the recyclables doesn’t cover the hauling, but we do get quarterly checks—one was for $10, one for $120. Originally, we paid up to $90 per ton for recyclables, but the market has shifted about a year ago. We don’t have to pay that $90 now.”

While other towns have implemented a Pay-As-You-Throw policy at their transfer stations, Washington’s select board has looked into it and found it would end up costing residents more in the long run. So, the best way to keep our costs down is to keep recyclables out of the compactor, break down boxes, or just use less packaging to begin with.

“When people ask me where to put their stuff, that shows me they care. Or when they bring in their box of broken down boxes. When people just show that they care about what they are doing and they try, that always makes me happy."