How Trash disposal works on Martha’s Vineyard

The following is a break down of the collection and distribution of trash and recyclable items for the towns of Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven.

OAK BLUFFS
508-693-5454

If you are a resident you may purchase a $10 sticker and dispose of all your trash in the proper recycling bins at the OB Transfer Station on Pennsylvania Ave. This is a free service for residents, paid for by the town, after sticker purchase.

Non residents must weight in to the scale and then, hopefully separate all trash into the proper bins. They will accept all waste except hazardous materials. The cost: mixed trash (single stream) - $153/per ton; Recyclables - $80/ton; construction debris - $171/ton. Appliances are $35

An alternative: a 96 gallon residential recycling container picked up at your site every other week by Bruno’s- $5.95 per pick-up.

VINEYARD HAVEN
508-696-4220

Trash is picked up weekly on the street at your house. Any trash container (up to 40 gallons,) single stream, must have a $4.00 sticker on the bagged material.

Everything in the recycling bin is free. This includes cans, glass containers, and plastic containers with the triangle on the bottom. You must separately tie newspapers and flattened cardboard. Magazines and phone books can be tied together. Nothing in bags.

These items must be included as trash: wax coated containers such as those containing milk, junk mail, glossy paper, wet paper, plastic bags, window glass, dishes, Pyrex, aluminum, paint or aerosols.

Tisbury Local Drop Off, open to residents only with a $5.00 sticker.

Residents may recycle there for free but must pay $4.00 for all 40 gal. containers of trash. All clean brush, leaves and garden vegetation is free.

The Tisbury Drop Off produces compost which residents may take home. MV landscapers can buy a $150/yr. permit to drop of landscaping debris.

Where does our garbage go?

Casella, West Wareham, MA
Construction dumpsters arrive here. The refuse from these are combed through to separate out the cardboard, lumber, plastic, large metal objects, with magnetic separation of the remainder. The lumber is shredded and sent off to be burned for electricity. The remainder is sold for recycling.

Check into mattresses, computers, TVs. CFL fluorescent light bulbs recycled at the ‘Universal Shed’ at the Edgartown Refuse District Center on the Edgartown West Tisbury Rd by the airport.

Covanta Energy, Rochester, MA, recycle all fluorescents and CFL bulbs.

Stop and Shop has a container at the door for plastic bags

Recycling on the Vineyard

The article on recycling in the recent VCS newsletter, ?Does the Vineyard really recycle? was featured in a recent edition of the Vineyard Gazette (see link here). This is a message that needs constant repeating as long as we continue to have such a confusing set of rules. One encouraging development since VCS prepared its? newsletter article is that Allied Waste has rolled its? residential recycling trial program into a full time single stream recycling pick up for residential customers. The Gazette article unfortunately did not include a reference to this new program which was introduced after publication of our newsletter. Allied now offers recycling pick-up in dedicated vehicles so there should be none of the mixing of recyclables with waste that people have reported over the years with various haulers. Allied now offers residential and commercial recycling services for the entire island except for Chappaquidick which will start on Sept. 4 according to Brian Smith.

Mr. Smith seemed excited and maybe even a little surprised that interest in recycling picked up so quickly . They will be adding vehicles in anticipation of expanding this effort. Although they are dedicating individual vehicles, Allied will be co-mingling the typical residential recyclables which most of us have become accustomed to faithfully separating. They can do this because their off-island processor manages recyclables in that way all recyclables are mixed (co-mingled) and brought to the processing facility which then sorts into the various types of recyclable materials.

Another positive effort took place recently at the Slow food event for both recycling and composting. Event-based waste management offers many unique opportunities and event sponsors are increasingly looking at ways to promote environmental awareness.

David Nash, Vineyard Conservation Society Board member

Farm and Field
By JULIA RAPPAPORT
MV Gazette

First published in the Vineyard Gazette on July 1, 2008. Reprinted with permission from the Vineyard Gazette. Copyright Vineyard Gazette 2007. All rights reserved.

Coffee grinds, apple cores and curly orange carrot peels: straight to the trash they go in most households. But on Island farms, these food scraps (along with egg shells, wilted greens and watermelon seeds) go to the compost. For the farmers, this trash is treasure.

“It’s like crop insurance,” explained Jim Athearn of Morning Glory Farm last week as he stepped down from his tractor.

“We have sandy soil,” he continued. “The goal of every farmer or agriculturalist is to increase the organic content matter of their soil so things will work better. This helps a lot. Things grow more uniformly. They grow faster and lusher.” He looked out over the green corn stalks now coming up in his fields along the West Tisbury-Edgartown Road. In just a few short weeks the stalks will reach shoulder height. In a few more, Mr. Athearn will harvest bushels of the large, sweet ears.

“Before we added the compost here, we could not produce a marketable-sized ear. There was not a full yield. Along where it was super sandy, it would grow only four or five feet high, even with all the water,” he said.

“Now that we have compost on it, we can expect to get corn along the whole length of the road. It’s bolstered by the soil, which adds nutrients. It just sort of adds life to this soil.”

Behind him was an empty field with soil a light brown. One small patch, however, was a dark espresso color, having just been covered with the fertilizer Mr. Athearn makes behind his farm stand.

A good fertilizer takes 18 months to make. It starts with heaps of food scraps and yard waste. Moisture builds over time and nutrients develop. Three times a year, Mr. Athearn turns the piles of dirt, grass cuttings, vegetable scraps and leaves. In the spring, he spreads it over his fields, mixing the rich soil with the sandy stuff. “It turns barely farmable soil into uniform soil,” he said.

More than 10 years ago, Mr. Athearn received a license from the state Department of Agricultural Resources to operate a composting site on the farm. He invited Island landscapers and local families to leave off their household food and yard waste. The compost is one of only a few places on the Island where the community can come dump its organic waste. The Edgartown transfer station accepts yard waste, but no food scraps, as does John Keene at his excavation pit in North Tisbury.

“It’s a good thing to do to open up the compost to the community,” Mr. Athearn said. “It’s keeping all of this material out of the landfills.”

All Island landfills are capped and all trash is shipped to the mainland. Donald Hatch, district manager at the Martha’s Vineyard Refuse Disposal and Resource Recovery District, said a study done last year estimated 40,000 tons of waste are hauled off the Island each year, a figure which is hard to calculate exactly because more than one operation collects and transports waste.

With fuel costs and Steamship Authority ticket prices rising, it is an expensive operation. “It now costs $500 round trip for one tractor trailer,” Mr. Hatch said.

“And one truck can carry 22 tons.”

Keeping natural waste on Island farms reduces the amount of trash shipped off-Island and helps cut some costs for Vineyard farmers, who pay a premium to buy fertilizer from off the Island. “It turns the garbage into an asset and a resource,” said Rob Kendall, a longtime board member of the Vineyard Conservation Society.

This summer, the society has teamed up with the Whippoorwill Farm Community Supported Agriculture program to start a community compost on the farm for members. “It’s critical to our goal, which is to improve the soil health and to grow our crops organically,” said farm owner Andrew Woodruff. The society will soon make available countertop composting bins made of recycled milk containers to members.

“We are encouraging members to bring their food scraps back to the farm,” said Kaysea Cole, communications, membership and development coordinator at the society. “We are encouraging people to reduce their waste and give back to the community, to think locally so we don’t have to ship compost in from off-Island.”

In mid-July, the farm will start building its piles and each week, will offer prizes to kids who bring in the most compost. Mr. Kendall hopes local chefs and stables will participate as well. By next year, Mr. Woodruff hopes to have his own fertilizer he can use in the fields and even in the greenhouse.

“A farm like this will always need as much organic waste as it can get,” Mr. Kendall said. “You can’t just plant and grow in the soil, you have to replace [the nutrients].”

The Whippoorwill Farm composting area likely will be a busy place. Over at Morning Glory, signs in both English and Portuguese mark the site entrance. Down a small dirt road sit two heaps of compost. Reaching up to 12 feet high in some spots, they stretch back 150 feet.

Since it opened, a gate leading to the compost has gone unlocked. The site went unmonitored and workers could dump for free. But as the piles have grown, the compost has taken up more of Mr. Athearn’s time. He scans the heaps daily for bottles and branches, which he has to remove, and turns the piles periodically.

“Without turning it, you won’t get the oxygen in there. Without the oxygen, there’s no decomposition,” he said.

It is the decomposition which turns the grass, the fruit rinds and vegetable peels into the rich soil Mr. Athearn will then spread on his fields and mix with the existing dirt, another time-consuming process. “I till the soil a lot more frequently than a hay farmer,” he said. “It takes a lot of time to spread on the fields. It delays the planting and requires special equipment.”

For Mr. Athearn, using his own fertilizer also increases the per acre cost of producing a crop. “You pay $250 per acre with fertilizer and $600 per acre to use compost once you’ve paid for the work and the tractor and hired the man to drive it,” he said.

This year, Mr. Athearn has for the first time hired a compost attendant to monitor the operation and he will charge a fee of $5 per truck load and $1 per garbage can to dump. The program is still in the experimental phase and prices could change, he said.

But, with healthy fields and thriving plants, Mr. Athearn said making his own compost is worth the extra effort. “It makes the soil useful,” he said.

When the topic of recycling comes up, one of the most frequently asked questions is: do we really recycle here on Martha’s Vineyard?

The answer is a clear and definite yes, but confusion does exist due to the different methods of handling recyclables.

Where does it all go?
Exactly where do our recyclables go after we put them at the curb or at one of our recycling centers? All our town and district transfer stations provide for recycling of bottles, cans, plastic containers, newspaper, and corrugated cardboard, as well as disposal options for tires, appliances, electronics, fluorescent bulbs, scrap metal and brush and leaves. You can be confident that all recyclable materials are being properly transferred to off-Island facilities for further processing into raw materials for the plastic, glass, paper and metals markets.

Curbside pickup is an entirely different story. That is where it pays for the consumer to know exactly what services are—or are not—being provided. In Oak Bluffs, for example, town service includes curbside pickup for trash only and residents must bring their recyclables to the transfer station. Seasonal visitors and vacationers may not be aware of that procedure and are surprised to see the local hauler place recyclables in with the trash. The haulers may be breaking state law (more about that later) but they are actually providing the service they were hired to provide. The Town of Tisbury provides residential pickup using trucks which have a compartmentalized feature which allows for more efficient handling of recycled items.

Private haulers such as Bruno’s Inc. and Bizzarro Services already provide that separation service, but may also be guilty of some co-mingling if the compartments they have dedicated to recyclables become full. If you observe any deliberate mixing of recyclables you should call the responsible party and report what you have observed.

Allied Waste (formerly BFI), is currently not fully outfitted to provide recycling pickup at the residential level. If you are their customer you should ask them what they are doing to better plan for recyclables. They have recently offered, on a trial basis and for an additional fee, residential pick-up for recyclables. According to the company, the service will be expanded if demand is demonstrated. Bottom line: waste haulers can provide recycling services. So there is no reason for any private, public or commercial generator of waste not to recycle.

Besides, recycling is the law!
Recyclables in Massachusetts are managed by the imposition of what is called the “waste ban” regulation. This means that certain materials are prohibited from being disposed of in a manner that will cause them to end up in either a landfill or a resource recovery facility (incinerator). Recyclables are “banned” from being disposed of at those locations. This differs from a mandatory recycling law which many Massachusetts communities have independently adopted (although none have done so here on the Vineyard).

The waste ban regulation is weaker. It allows recyclables to be mixed with trash as long as there exists a “reasonable plan” to inspect and observe incoming loads so that any with “excessive” amounts of recyclables can be rejected as violating the waste ban provisions. This less stringent standard introduces confusion and discourages good recycling practices.

Closer scrutiny
So what can we do? First, we can make sure that haulers responsible for getting recyclables to the transfer facilities are doing so in a manner that supports your wishes. If they are not, hire someone else, or take responsibility for your own recyclables, consistent with town rules. Simply bring them to your local facility, where they will be handled according to proper procedures.

And all of us need to encourage our local officials to be more proactive in increasing the availability of recycling opportunities for both the resident population and the seasonal and tourist populations. We need to encourage placement of recycling containers in locations exposed to high volumes of pedestrian traffic. The recent collaboration between VCS and the Steamship Authority resulting in recycling containers at the SSA terminals and on ferries is a tremendous first step. Other locations which could benefit from such efforts include special-event venues, shopping areas, downtown shopping centers, and transportation centers such as the airport and Transit Authority hubs.

We need to place satellite drop-off centers for recyclables closer to residential areas rather than having the town trash transfer stations serving as the only location for recyclables. Another tip: if you rent your property, make sure you are providing proper instructions and supplies for your renters to be able to recycle here just as they do at home!

Toward mandatory recycling
There will always be those who litter and those who make business decisions that aren’t in the best interests of the environment. Recycling is not an easy thing to do for many people and we need to make sure that we have the support systems in place to minimize obstacles and inconvenience. Understanding existing laws and working with our town leaders to assure that they provide a high-quality system are good places to start. Next steps? Ask your town selectmen to bring to the All-Island Selectmens’ table the question of whether the time is right for island-wide mandatory recycling!

David Nash, VCS Board
oystercatcher@verizon.net

ON BOARD!
THE VINEYARD CONSERVATION SOCIETY AND STEAMSHIP AUTHORITY INTRODUCE RECYCLING IN TERMINALS AND ON FERRYS

The Vineyard Conservation Society (VCS) is pleased to announce that recycling has begun at the Steamship Authority. The achievement comes thanks to the enthusiasm and cooperation of SSA management, and is part of VCS’s broader advocacy campaign for improved waste management on Martha’s Vineyard.

Starting last summer, the two organizations began working together to identify an appropriate bin design, research cost-effective purchase options, and arrange for Vineyard-based recycling services. VCS supported the effort with funds from a bequest from conservationist Nellie Mendenhall, a pioneer in introducing recycling on the Vineyard.

The result of the collaboration is new recycling bins on the Steamship vessels and in the terminals. The bins are made entirely from recycled plastic milk containers.

First impressions go a long way, and now visitors will see that Vineyarders recycle! This launch is the first phase of a larger waste management initiative by the Vineyard Conservation Society, where the hope is that standardized recycling bins like those at the SSA will be installed at public places around the Island.

For more information on how you can help support efforts like this one please call VCS at 508 693-9588 or visit us online at almanac.vcsmv.org.

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