After 26 years of progressive experience in the packaging reuse and recycling fields, I have developed a good knowledge of the preferred methods and processes surrounding “post-consumer materials” — a familiar industry term often still referred to as “waste.”
The recycling industry is aware these materials have economic value and often is remiss in not offering compensation to the household sorter for his or her labor in presorting. At a company in California, for example, consumers bring their recyclables to a weigh station, and they receive compensation by weight for their materials and efforts.
Constructively, I have several ideas on how to manage post-consumer materials in Greater Bangor. Thus, I have shared the following comments with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection regarding the proposal for a new facility in Hampden to handle the area’s solid waste:
— There is an urgent need for a national debate — more than a local or regional one — on the future of materials recovery facilities (MRF) in the United States and elsewhere. Otherwise, the general lack of information for local residents results in a process that relies too heavily on the recycling industry alone. The benefits of having the input of economists, sociologists, historians, bankers, engineers and others are many. The same is true for incineration, landfilling and other post-consumer material management systems.
— I strongly recommend a return to a policy of using free household presort labor, resembling the city of Bangor’s former program and New Brunswick, Canada’s bottle return system. I fail to see the benefits of consuming energy to run large sorting plants worldwide when we can rely on the free labor supplied by residents to presort recyclables before curbside collection. It seems a better use of resources to invest in education for the general public and businesses on a wide scale, such as through Environmental Protection Agency-sponsored media campaigns, properly vetted and aimed at a national audience.
— I strongly object to the structure of the proposal in Hampden, under which residents would co-mingle dirty post-consumer materials with clean, recyclable ones, resulting in contamination that, by some industry reports, creates a net loss of more than 10 percent of the materials handled. Where do these contaminated products end up?
— From a sociological perspective, I object to the direction of creating dull, depressing and uninspiring jobs of the conveyor belt, material-picking sort. There also are safety concerns related to such jobs from handling broken glass and unwashed post-consumer materials.
Disposing of our waste and recyclables in this way perpetuates a culture of disposability rather than a culture of sustainability.
Jay Dresser of Bangor is a former, four-year member of the Bangor Recycling Committee. He owns a reusable glass bottle corporation in Bangor and has 26 years of experience in the recycling field.