{"id":190336,"date":"2025-09-29T17:13:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T17:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/190336\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T17:13:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T17:13:16","slug":"why-recyclables-are-ending-up-in-nh-landfills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/190336\/","title":{"rendered":"Why recyclables are ending up in NH landfills"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new study<\/a> found that 20% of what Granite Staters throw in the trash is recyclable. Those materials are also worth a lot of money \u2013 roughly $23 million. And these are the kinds of things commonly included in recycling programs, like newspapers, cans and plastic water bottles.<\/p>\n

In Keene, 80% of what people bring to the dump is trash that ends up in a landfill, and those bags also often have recycling inside.<\/p>\n

Duncan Watson is the head of Keene\u2019s recycling center and transfer station. Even though he\u2019s proud of his work, he\u2019ll let you call it the dump.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve surrendered to it,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t smell trash, I smell money. Waste is a big business.\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trash disposal and recycling bring in some serious cash. The Keene dump pays for itself by charging people who bring trash to the facility, and the recycling center there also brings money in by selling the cardboard, cans, bottles and more.<\/p>\n

Inside the recycling center building there\u2019s a long conveyor belt where employees stand, sorting the recycling that comes from Keene\u2019s curbside pick up.<\/p>\n

\"Recyclables<\/p>\n

Recyclables piled at the Keene Recycling Center. <\/p>\n

What can be recycled goes into different piles of paper and plastic, and a machine with a magnet takes care of some metals, pulling them off the belt into another pile. What can\u2019t be recycled is tossed out.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou’ll see that there’s a bin there that’s collecting all the things that people put in the recycling bin that are either contaminated in some way,\u201d Watson shouted over the din of the conveyer belt and recycling being flung in different directions. \u201cSo maybe a peanut butter jar that people didn’t rinse the peanut butter out [of] or an item that we don’t accept just because it’s an off-spec plastic or some other material that we don’t currently recycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Aluminum<\/p>\n

Aluminum cans at Keene’s recycling center and transfer station are compressed and bailed so they can be sold to vendors. <\/p>\n

Watson can\u2019t sell materials that are dirty to vendors, so they have to be tossed.<\/p>\n

Outside the recycling center is the transfer station area where garbage trucks line up, waiting to dump their trash. Two excavators pick up the garbage with the claw, swinging it into a large open trailer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get about 26 tons for every one of those trailers that’s loaded out,\u201d Watson said. \u201cAnd we’ll do several of those every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trash disposal is what brings in the most money to Watson\u2019s facility. But the dump will also have to pay for these tons of garbage to be dropped off at Turnkey Landfill in Rochester. There is a lot of cardboard in the trash heaps, and Watson said recycling gets in the transfer station\u2019s trash piles because it was brought there in one mixed container.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf people had a way of separating it out then, then it could have been recycled through our process,\u201d Watson said.<\/p>\n

He isn\u2019t surprised by all the recycling at the transfer station, but he said it takes too much time for his employees to regularly sift through the trash.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you actually go in there and stopped everything, started picking through it,\u201d Watson said, pointing to the transfer station, \u201cYou’d be surprised at the amount of recycling that goes through our transfer station on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Duncan<\/p>\n

Duncan Watson is the head of Keene’s recycling center and transfer station. He stands in front of recycling ready to be sorted.<\/p>\n

Michael Nork is with the state\u2019s department of environment services. He worked on the state\u2019s Waste Characterization Study<\/a>, which essentially audited the trash Granite Staters were sending to landfills.<\/p>\n

He says New Hampshire doesn\u2019t require people to recycle so they don\u2019t have to if they don\u2019t want to. Also, not everyone can do it easily, even if they want to recycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake, for example, apartment buildings. Oftentimes those kinds of housing situations don’t have readily available recycling access,\u201d Nork said. \u201cThe landlord might provide a dumpster for trash, but not necessarily an additional dumpster for mixed recycling or something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

If people still want to recycle in these situations, they have to go to the local transfer station. If it\u2019s not convenient, they might just throw their recycling in the garbage.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

An excavator in the transfer station moves trash headed for a landfill in Rochester. <\/p>\n

And while recycling makes money for towns and cities, it can be costly for a business. Some have to pay every time a truck picks up their trash from a dumpster. If they recycled, they might need to pay for a second dumpster.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis happens a lot with smaller businesses, Nork said. \u201cThey may not have a lot of resources so they’re looking to figure out what’s the most economical for them. And sometimes recycling doesn’t fit into that picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Duncan Watson hopes there will be investments in recycling infrastructure that will eventually allow people to dispose of everything in one dumpster and then get sorted out for recycling.<\/p>\n

Michael Nork said he wasn\u2019t aware of a place in the region that does whole waste stream disposal like that, but there are single stream recycling facilities like ecomaine in Maine<\/a> that can recycle even more things than many municipal dumps accept. They use technology like lasers to identify different types of plastics and air jets to push objects into sorting piles.<\/p>\n

But these are expensive and ambitious facilities, and Watson is retiring soon so he likely won\u2019t see those big investments happen during his career in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

At the transfer station, he reflects on seeing so many potentially recyclable things heading to Rochester\u2019s landfill.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course it’s bothersome,\u201d he said. \u201cI’m into resource conservation, and I think we can do better.\u201d<\/p>\n

For now, the heaps of cardboard and other materials in the transfer station are heading to Rochester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new study found that 20% of what Granite Staters throw in the trash is recyclable. Those materials…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-190336","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}