A Journey to Recycle Circle

On one cold Feb. 13th afternoon I took a trip to my local New London, Transfer Station. (Because of my tight schedule with skiing I was unable to attend the trip to the andover Transfer station.) I pulled in on a street named Recycle Circle and was immediately welcomed by the sight of the hustle and bustle of the 17 cars full of trash trying to be emptied at the same time.




With my absence of class the day my D block APES class visited Andover, I decided to reach out to my town Public Works Director to answer a few questions that I had on my local, town transfer station. 





I had five specific questions that I was curious about to enhance my understanding of my town transfer station.

     1. What percent of all the waste in the town is recovered through recycling? (Last year, New London recycled about 23% of our waste stream.)

Recycling (Pre-sort drop off)

     2. How many people does the transfer station usually see daily? (On average the town sees 300 vehicles per day. It can fluctuate due to the seasons. Summer and get up to 500 vehicles per day.)

     3. Is there a certain type of recycling system that we have? (New London uses a drop off system. Home owners need to pre-sort recyclables and the town will then process them separately.)

The recycling building

     4. Where does the trash go? Landfill or Incineration? (Trash from New London goes to a landfill in Berlin NH.)

Trash shoot into an 18 wheeler

     5. What are the items the town struggles with getting rid of the most? (Richard Lee, New London Public Works Director, told me that the items the town struggles most with is generally  all recyclables, but paper is the larges struggle to get rid of.)




Even though my experience was slightly different and didn't take place in a class setting I believe that my time spent at the New London transfer station was valuable. While the New London and Andover transfer stations hold similarities they also hold major differences. In Andover, the town runs on Single stream recycling which is zero sort, and all recyclables can get thrown together. In New London, the town runs on a pre-sort system where all recyclables must be sorted by the home owner. As a result to the different styles of recycling Andover recovers 72% of its waste while New London only recovers 23% of waste. I strongly believe this is due to the single stream recycling Andover uses which takes up less space, takes up less time, and takes up less energy.

In New London, the waste that is not recovered it eventually transported to a landfill in Berlin NH, while Andover's waste is brought to an incinerator. Both methods work to get rid of the trash we produce, but neither are 100% clean and 100% safe for the environment.



My takeaway from this experience is that recycling in a major part in the battle to our global trash problem. As a community we must reduce and reuse as much as possible to give our planet the best chance of survival. Also through comparing the Andover and New London transfer stations, I can now say that I am a believer in the single stream recycling, and will hope to do further research and data collection that I can use to help my town make an informed and factual decision on our recycling choices. Maybe New London has been doing it wrong all along.

The benefit of recycling 

All photos taken by Eric Bonewald