On the heels of stricter enforcement of ordinance-required recycling at the Waldoboro Solid Waste Transfer Station, a meeting between the transfer station committee and waste haulers brought no widespread agreement on whether or where related problems exist.
The special meeting of the transfer station committee was held Oct. 24 specifically to gather feedback from the waste haulers on the increased enforcement, but discussions lead to flaring tempers in both groups and to a committee member, haulers, and town officials walking out of the meeting.
An requirement in the ordinance to bring all recyclables generated in Waldoboro, Cushing, and Friendship to the transfer station has been under discussion for months with concerns raised in particular over the time and effort it takes for haulers to load yards of cardboard manually into the covered container at the transfer station.
Haulers who collect recyclables from within the three towns can deposit or sell them elsewhere, but are required to submit a report on the categories and weights of those recyclables.
Permitted users who do not recycle or haulers who do not deposit all their recyclables at the transfer station, however, face dumping fees of $13.50 per uncompacted cubic yard or $35 per compacted cubic yard of solid waste, according to the ordinance.
Aside from minimizing the costs of disposing of recyclables in the same manner as trash (shipping it to Penobscot Energy Recovery Company to be burned for electricity generation), the recycling requirement is in place to provide revenue for Lincoln County Recycling to maintain its level of operation, according to Public Works Director John Daigle.
“If we didn’t have Lincoln County [Recycling], we would be around a $1 million operation,” Daigle said. “We would need three or four more people up there.”
Others at the meeting pointed fingers at Lincoln County Recycling for not having the right equipment to efficiently handle the haulers’ volume, and questioned the reasoning behind requiring recycling at the transfer station when the materials are still recycled.
“It’s not about Lincoln County Recycling, it’s about our communities and our taxpayers, … they don’t care where their recycling goes as long as its recycled,” said committee alternate and hauler Terry Gifford.
Still others put the onus back on the haulers, claiming it is a business decision the haulers need to make on complying with the ordinance – whether it is worth their time to load into the provided containers or pay to dump trash, and whether to charge their customers extra in turn.
Read the full report in the Oct. 31 edition of The Lincoln County News.
