CRRABlog

You ask, we answer

2011-08-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

George asks: Most oil and hazardous liquids come in a number 2 plastic bottle. These are things a homeowner would have a lot of, like, oil, antifreeze, weed killer or dozens of other products that come in these containers. If the bottles are washed out, can they be recycled and if not why?

George: You raise a good point, but the situation you describe is not unlike our experience with another recyclable material, namely cardboard. Pizza comes in cardboard boxes, and there was a time when we said pizza boxes were acceptable if they were clean. We soon found out that different people had different definitions of "clean," and soon we were getting pizza boxes that were greasy or had cheese stuck to them, and before long it was just easier to not accept pizza boxes at all.

The point here, and we do have one (apologies to Ellen DeGeneres), is that it's easier to just ask people to bring these materials to a hazardous-waste collection, ensuring the contents will be safely disposed of.

These kids get it -- do you?

2011-02-04T07:25:00.001-08:00

Check out this video made by children at Mary M. Hooker Environmental Sciences Magnet School in Hartford:

Maybe there, but not here

2010-12-21T11:32:00.000-08:00

You may have heard a story on NPR called "After Dump, What Happens To Electronic Waste?" which told the oft-told tale that electronics recycling isn't always what it seems.

Maybe that's true elsewhere, but not for residents of towns that rely on CRRA for electronics recycling. We contract with eco International, one of the nation’s electronics recycling leaders, to keep these items out of the waste stream. At its facility in Vestal, N.Y., eco International dismantles items into raw materials, such as copper, steel, aluminum, glass and plastic, and sells these materials to firms who turn them into new products.

eco International has signed the Basel Action Network Pledge of True Stewardship, an internationally recognized commitment to responsible recycling and has been audited by CHWMEG, Inc.; results of that audit can be reviewed on-line.

We're not saying this to brag, but merely to reassure you that we're doing everything we can to provide this service the right way.

We're also awaiting word that the statewide electronics recycling program being crafted by the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection is ready to launch.

We've inspired a holiday tree

2010-12-09T08:06:00.001-08:00

There's a new holiday tree in the center of Stratford, and it's made from recycled materials.

Local business leaders got the idea in the spring at the grand opening of the Garbage Museum's first professional art exhibit. They saw how people react to Trash-o-saurus and wanted to create the same effect in their central business district.

You can read more here and here.

Phone books on the verge of extinction?

2010-11-11T06:08:00.001-08:00

Just noticed this item about the possibility of telephone directories being phased out.

One of the most frequent questions we're asked is about recycling of phone books. We can't accept them because the binding fouls our processing equipment. Telephone companies have blue barrels outside their offices and local switching equipment buildings for recycling the books.

And remember us?????

2010-11-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

We couldn't help but notice this editorial headlined "Remember Renewable Energy?" in The New York Times the other day.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, three of the top 10 renewable energy producers in New England are trash-to-energy plants. Our own Mid-Connecticut Project facility is the fourth-largest in the six-state region.

Not only are we making electricity with a fuel supply that is endless (at least until someone waves a magic wand and turns this into a zero-waste society), it reduces by 90 percent the amount of landfill space we need for our solid waste.

And, in a 2002 letter, U.S. EPA Assistant Administrators Jeffery Holmstead and Marianne Lamont Horinko recognized the “vital role of the nation’s municipal waste-to-energy industry” and concluded that “these plants produce 2800 megawatts of electricity with less environmental impact than almost any other source of electricity.”

Just sayin'.

Our Museums' record summer

2010-09-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

Green is hot. And it’s cooler than ever. At least in Connecticut.

This summer, more people visited the CRRA Trash Museum in Hartford and Garbage Museum in Stratford, and more people took part in their award-winning sustainability education programs, than in any other summer on record.

The table you see here tells the story. In July and August, almost 9,000 people turned to our Museums to learn about recycling, energy conservation, composting and other hot green topics. Over 3,100 people visited the Garbage Museum in the summer vacation months.

Year-to-date, we’re not far off the pace we set in 2008, when both Museums enjoyed record numbers.

We’re proud of our education programs, proud of our educators and confident that our efforts are making a difference in our environment.

By the way, have you become a fan of the Trash Museum or the Garbage Museum on Facebook?

We know there are fewer bottles being recycled, but are people really buying less bottled water?

2010-08-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

Recently you may have heard or read that the state isn’t taking in as much money from unclaimed deposits on plastic water bottles as some officials had hoped.

In 2009 Connecticut expanded its bottle bill to put five-cent deposits on plastic water bottles, the same deposit Connecticut consumers pay on beer and soda bottles and cans. But where the bottlers and distributors keep the nickels from unredeemed beer and soda containers, the state would keep the unclaimed water deposits.

When the legislation was passed in 2009, state officials said they expected to take in $17 million a year in unclaimed water bottle deposits. At 20 bottles per dollar, that would have required 340 million bottles going unredeemed every year, out of estimated annual sales of more than 500 million bottles, a number used by both the state and the Container Recycling Institute, a bottle-bill proponent.

The expansion took effect on Oct. 1, 2009. While numbers for the full fiscal year (which ended June 30) are not yet available, in April it was reported that the state only collected $680,000 from January through March of 2010. That’s 13.6 million unredeemed bottles for those of you without a calculator handy.

As far back as 2007, CRRA had been warning of the unintended consequences of putting a deposit on water bottles – namely, the adverse impact it would have on curbside recycling. CRRA processes the recyclables collected from residents of 76 cities and towns at no cost to those towns. (Those same towns pay as much as $69 per ton to bring us their garbage, underscoring the fiscal benefits of recycling.)

The larger of our two recycling systems, the Mid-Connecticut Project, has an annual budget of about $1.4 million, all paid for by proceeds from the sale of paper, cardboard, aluminum, steel, glass and plastic we sort and bale at our recycling processing facility in Hartford. In fact, because the 64 Mid-Connecticut Project recycling towns continue to increase their recycling rate, they’ve generated enough revenue to allow us to pay them rebates in 2008 and 2009. (We don’t have final figures for this year yet.)

That’s all good news. But the situation could have been even better, because it appears people have dramatically reduced their purchases of bottled water. How do we know? If the state is collecting fewer unredeemed deposits than it anticipated, then if consumers are buying the same number of bottles, CRRA and other recyclers should be seeing more.

However, our Mid-Connecticut system saw a substantial dropoff in the amount of polyethelene (PET, or #1 plastic), the material of which water and soda bottles are made, starting last October. Consider: in the nine months before the expansion took effect, we processed and shipped about 223 tons per month of PET. In the first nine months after the expansion, we processed and shipped about 156 tons per month, a 30-percent drop.

This chart shows those month-by-month figures. The dropoff hit in October 2009, exactly when the expansion hit.

The 67 tons of plastic represents about 29 million fewer bottles purchased in Mid-Connecticut towns. Extrapolated over the population of the entire state, that’s about 90 million fewer water bottles in those nine months – far more than the difference between what the state anticipated and what actually happened.

More to the point, that loss of plastic hurts curbside recycling, which, as we said earlier, depends on revenues from sales of recycled materials. In June, a ton of #1 plastic fetched about $400 on the commodities market. Commodity prices fluctuate, but even at $300 per ton those 67 tons per month cost the Mid-Connecticut system just under $250,000, or almost one-fifth of the entire year’s budget.

Marion launches a revolution?

2010-07-09T02:55:00.000-07:00

We introduced you to our friend Marion, who was concerned about all the paper her children brought home from school and whether their school recycled.

Now comes this story from Southborough, Mass., with a parent voicing a similar question.

Here in Connecticut, the standard state science curriculum includes an Earth Science component, usually in Grades 4 and 6. In many schools, that component includes a trip to either our Garbage Museum in Stratford or our Trash Museum in Hartford, where our educators get students excited about recycling, teaching them that a lot of seemingly small actions can add up to a big positive impact on our environment.

It's frustrating to find out that some schools aren't always reinforcing this message.

Parents: do your schools recycle?

Teachers and administrators: do your schools recycle?

A couple of interesting ideas

2010-06-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

These came to us from Santanu Majmudar, the University of Hartford professor whose students' work is now on display at the Trash Museum:

A sober look at trash-to-energy

2010-04-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times this week spent a good deal of bandwidth on the merits of trash-to-energy.

On Monday, The Times published a story headlined "Europe Finds Clean Energy in Trash, but U.S. Lags" that described the use of trash-to-energy in Denmark.

According to the story:

Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The plants run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.

The story cites a study done by EPA and North Carolina State University that determined trash-to-energy is much more environmentally-responsible than landfilling.

On Tuesday, The Times's online edition kicked off a discussion entitled "Should the U.S. Burn or Bury Its Trash?"

The discussion ventured into the ideas of zero-waste and massive recycling systems as practiced in Japan and some European nations. These are both worthy ideals, but most Americans want convenience -- even if it costs a little more -- and these systems aren't convenient enough.

Connecticut's solid waste hierarchy, as established in Sec. 22a-228b of the Connecticut General Statutes, has led to Connecticut's recycling about 25 percent of its solid waste. There's certainly room for improvement with some reasonable steps -- more processing infrastructure to cut down on transportation costs, help for communities that want to switch to single-stream recycling and automated collection but can't afford the capital investment, more enforcement of the state's recycling laws and regulations -- but even with all these steps, until we get to zero-waste we're still going to have garbage to get rid of. Trash-to-energy really is the best option.

Ash Landfills: Someone’s Gotta Have Them

2010-03-05T08:08:00.000-08:00

Kendra Richardson wrote this piece for her Magazine Journalism course at the University of Connecticut:

Ash landfills are necessary in Connecticut, whether residents like it or not. These landfills, a disposal site for what’s left after garbage is incinerated, are not developed until the state Department of Environmental Protection has ensured they met environmental standards. Yet the idea of dumping ash is a scary concept for residents who live near the sites.

On March 26, 2008, the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority announced it had chosen Franklin as the site for a new ash landfill. The small town is located in the “Last Green Valley” of northeastern Connecticut.

The CRRA chose a 350-acre site in Franklin, of which approximately 90 acres would be used as the actual landfill. The remaining acres would act as a buffer between the landfill and the surrounding residential area.

Residents of Franklin quickly protested, and now the CRRA has announced it will suspend its efforts to develop the landfill. However, a need remains since the Hartford landfill has reached capacity and closed down in late 2008 after 64 years of operation.

Connecticut now has one active ash landfill in Putnam. This is privately owned by Wheelabrator Technologies Incorporated. According to Robert Jacques, Wheelabrator’s Manager of Business Development, the landfill has space to accommodate ash for 17 years. However, according to Paul Nonnemacher, the CRRA’s Director of Public Affairs, the estimated 17 years may be correct, but not exactly accurate.

Wheelebrator’s Putnam landfill accommodates space for out-of-state plants that bring their ash in. Nonnemacher said that after nine years the landfill will have reached its capacity with in-state ash and that the remaining eight years is reserved for out of-state plants. Nonnemacher said, “Whatever is there [Putnam] is a short term solution, to a very long term problem. Garbage is not going to go away, and Putnam is not the best solution.”

This leaves Connecticut with unresolved trash problems. Why wasn’t an ash landfill installed in Franklin? In order to answer this question a person needs to understand the disposal process.

Connecticut is one of the approximately 30 states in the U.S. that uses an alternative energy process for waste disposal. There are six plants currently running in Connecticut. Ash, the non-combustible residue left after incineration, has been dumped in Hartford or Putnam for years. Its wet consistency means it does not blow in the wind and residents of the surrounding area in Putnam have never had a problem with it.

Jessica Wilson, a resident of Woodstock who lives on the Putnam town line, said, “I have never had a problem with the landfill, it never really even comes up in town news. All I know is it brings in money for the town of Putnam. I’ve never even noticed trucks carrying ash.”

Correct she is —— the landfill does bring Putnam money. The landfill is expected to bring in almost $3 million this year.

The ash that is left from the incineration process, which is about 70 to 80 percent less by volume than before, must go somewhere. That is where the landfill comes in. Trucks carry the ash from the incinerator to a landfill, where the ash is dumped into a massive pool-like deposit area.

When Franklin residents caught wind of the CRRA’s plan to start testing the proposed site for the landfill, the town went into an uproar. Residents started a campaign called “Dump the Dump.” Even months after the plan was squashed, yellow signs appear plastered on nearly every family’s front lawn reading, “DUMP the DUMP! Keep Franklin Green and Clean.” Many residents were determined to stop an ash landfill from being developed.

Residents expressed legitimate fears. Their fears included a traffic increase on Route 32, the possibility of the landfill leaking, hundreds of acres of the beautiful country land being ruined, toxins flowing into the air and into their drinking supply, the threat to biodiversity, and archeological history being destroyed. They said it could lower property value as well, and raise unknown environmental concerns.

Nonnemacher believes residents concerns were unfounded.

“I would not feel bad [to have such a facility near his house] because I understand how these things are built, engineered and operated. And so, if they found a site that met the criteria, I wouldn’t have a problem with it,” he said. “Even if I lived next door, I wouldn’t have a problem with it because I know enough about them.”
Nonnemacher said however that while these fears were genuine, they simply were not backed up by factual information. He said the potential of a double-lined landfill leaking was slim to none.

“The facts and the science indicate there was no cause for concern here,” he said, “Nobody else had ever monitored the groundwater [before we had]. DEP would not let us build there if there was any indication that there were any possibility chemicals could get into their drinking water. No cause for concern on this score either.”

The ash landfill would have three layers of plastic liners, two layers of clay liners, would sit more than five feet away from the ground water, and two wells would monitor on opposite ends of structure. Also, the DEP requires that ash landfills are built adjacent to a Class-B river or stream, thus making the Shetucket River a very viable option. The DEP would prohibit a landfill from being built anywhere near a body of water that was used for drinking.

Nonnemacher said Windham once operated an ash landfill that has since closed down, but remains unlined. He said water flows under this unlined ash landfill upstream from the Franklin site, and into the Shetucket River where swimming and fishing is permitted. There have been no ill effects from old ash landfill and the DEP has not deemed the fish unsafe to consume. Yet, there is still a huge objection to a safer, new ash landfill.

Another main concern is destruction of the land. Of the 695,000 acres in the Last Green Valley, 90 of that would be transformed to accommodate the landfill. The CRRA assured residents that only those acres would be excavated and the remaining would be left in its natural state. The Putnam landfill, in accordance, has walking trails and paths that the town has maintained since it opened. The CRRA also speculates that since there is a reasonable amount of gravel underneath the Franklin property, there is a good chance a mining operation could be installed. If this were the case—the excavation would far exceed that of the CRRA’s.

In May of 2009, Wheelabrator held a 10th-anniversary celebration for visitors who were interested in learning more about the site. According to an article in the Norwich Bulletin, residents were provided with charts and graphs to help them understand the intricate process of the landfill. They were also given samples of honey made by the on-site beehives, and flower seeds that were grown there, as well. Author James Mosher said, “former skeptics were won over.”

Johanne Boisvert, a resident who lives only miles from the Putnam ash landfill, said the site is “perfect for walking your dogs, it's peaceful and quiet. I don’t think many people even know the walking trials are on the site of a landfill.”

Now that there is no potential for an ash landfill in Franklin, residents have suggested the CRRA begin to look elsewhere. The conundrum lies in where else the state should put the landfill. The CRRA says it did extensive research and Franklin was absolutely the best place. The Franklin residents have also suggested the CRRA try to find another spot. If an ash landfill is unacceptable in their town, however, why would other towns want them? Franklin residents are offering ideas that are really not a solution.

After the plan was squashed, the CRRA went back and checked all of its work and checked if there were any other potential sites in Connecticut. Nonnemacher said, “we sent a letter to every town in Connecticut except Franklin and asked them if they may happen to know a site that would be suitable for one. A couple of towns did offer sites, but they didn’t meet all the criteria.”

Nonnemacher said they contacted Cheshire, Conn., but it was “just an effort to make sure we didn’t overlook anywhere.” He said CRRA is shopping for privately owned landfills.

Since the Hartford landfill closed, the CRRA has been sending ash to privately owned companies, which has increased in price by 14 percent. Sending the ash out of state would cost Connecticut taxpayers even more money.

For right now, Nonnemacher urges Connecticut to recycle as much as possible as they try to figure out the best solution to this problem.

A wildlife habitat on top of a landfill?

2010-01-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

Seems the New York Times has just found out what we've known in Hartford for years -- that landfills can be significant bird habitats.

Today's story talks about bird-watchers enjoying a new park on top of the old Fresh Kills Landfill. For years, members of the Hartford Audubon Society have been visiting the Hartford landfill as part of its summer and Christmas bird counts.

The Hartford landfill, after 68 years of service, accepted its last deliveries of waste on December 31, 2008. Now we're eagerly awaiting the City of Hartford's plans for its use once its capping is completed in the next couple of years.

More plastics? Not just yet

2010-01-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

You've probably heard by now that CRRA will soon be accepting all types of plastic at its Mid-Connecticut Project recycling facility.

However, contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, it's not happening just yet. The company manufacturing the equipment we need has informed us that we won't have the equipment until later this winter, so as of now we're hoping to begin accepting these additional materials in early spring. We'll keep you posted.

And also remember that this will only apply to residents of those 64 towns that send their recyclables to our Mid-Connecticut facility. Check this list; if your town is marked with an asterisk, or does not appear at all, your hauler or local public works department can tell you what you can and can't recycle.

NBC-Connecticut on single-stream recycling

2010-01-11T07:58:00.001-08:00

NBC-Connecticut's Ryan Hanrahan just took a look at CRRA's single-stream recycling and, more importantly, its success.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/video.

On your radio

2010-01-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

CRRA's Paul Nonnenmacher joined Mike Paine of Paine's Recycling & Rubbish Removal on Tuesday's "Colin McEnroe Show" on WNPR-FM.

You can listen to a podcast of the show . And here's Colin's blog posting about the program.

Congratulations, Diane!

2010-01-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

A tip of the hat to our friend, Diane Vasseur, who has just become chairwoman of the Milford Environmental Concerns Coalition. Diane has been a big supporter of the sustainability education programs CRRA offers through the Garbage Museum and the Trash Museum.

Good luck, Diane!

A year's worth of trash on display

2009-11-30T13:29:00.000-08:00

Back in January, "Sustainable Dave" Chameides donated a year's worth of his trash to the Trash Museum.

Before you get grossed out, what he donated was the result of his year-long experiment to see how strictly he could limit his waste output.

By doing things like using reusable containers and utensils, recycling and composting, he accumulated 28.5 pounds of trash. We've turned it into an exhibit which is now on display at the Trash Museum. In the meantime, here's more about Sustainable Dave from Good Morning America:

Good Morning America from Sustainable Dave on Vimeo.

With apologies to Robert Fulghum . . .

2009-10-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

. . . all you really need to know about the bottle bill you can learn at the recycling plant. And what you'll learn is that people prefer the ease and convenience of curbside recycling rather than the bottle-bill system.

This is a picture of a bale of aluminum cans waiting to be shipped from CRRA's regional recycling facility in Hartford to a processor which will turn them into new products. Highlighted are cans which could have been returned for redemption but weren't. Why? Obviously, we couldn't track down each consumer, but it's not hard to surmise that people would rather place these and other deposit bottles and cans in their curbside bins than save them in their basement or garage or kitchen and make a special trip to the supermarket or redemption center to get their nickels back.

In this case, one picture really is worth a thousand words. Or, more to the point, a thousand nickels.

CRRA is on twitter

2009-09-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

Now you can follow CRRA on twitter.

Clearing up some lingering misconceptions

2009-09-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

As the tragic Annie Le case unfolded over the last several days, CRRA was for a short time the center of the story as state and federal investigators searched through thousands of tons of garbage at our Hartford trash-to-energy plant. Since garbage from New Haven is sometimes brought to Hartford for disposal, investigators had reason to think they might find evidence at the plant.

By Sunday afternoon, a crowd of television crews and print reporters had formed at the entrance to our waste processing facility on Maxim Road. In their rush to get information on the air or on-line, some inaccurate reports were published and broadcast that, unfortunately, created confusion about what may or may not be happening at our Hartford facilities.

Here are the facts about those reports.

Investigators were NOT searching the Hartford landfill. Early Sunday afternoon, as information was passed from source to reporter to editor and from news outlet to news outlet, “searching a Hartford trash facility” morphed into “searching the Hartford landfill.” Connecticut is unique in relying almost completely on trash-to-energy for disposing of its garbage; in fact, when the Windsor landfill closes in a couple of years, Connecticut will be the first and only state in the country with no active trash landfills.

Nevertheless, people heard and read these preliminary reports and began asking whether trash was still being delivered to the Hartford landfill. That is not the case, and as media outlets began calling CRRA with questions about the search, we were able to correct the reports.

But just for the record: the last load of waste was delivered to the Hartford landfill on December 31, 2008. (See the video below.)

There were also reports that the waste processing facility was a medical waste facility – again, not true. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection requires medical waste to be handled separately and disposed of at specially-permitted facilities.

Here's a news report about the Hartford landfill's final delivery of trash:

Save the Garbage Museum!

2009-04-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

You may have heard that the Garbage Museum is in danger of closing.

The Garbage Museum has provided recycling and environmental education programs to almost 300,000 people since it opened in 1993. We were green before green was cool.

Since the news that we're in a race against time to raise money to save the Museum, lots of amazing people have come forward to help.

For example, Diane Vasseur, a Milford environmentalist and a good friend of the Museum and recycling, has started a blog called "Save the Stratford, CT Garbage Museum" and is organizing fund-raisers and spreading the word about the Museum.

And our friend Joanna Templeton of New Canaan and advertising agency Y&R in New York has produced a 60-second audio spot that paints a vivid picture of the Stratford recycling center (we never thought it could sound this beautiful) and ends with a plea for help. You can hear the spot at the Garbage Museum's page on CRRA's Web site.

In the next few days, you'll read about other people who are coming to our aid, and the outpouring of support has been extremely gratifying. We all have friends when things are good, but when we're in trouble we find out who our true friends are.

CRRA on the air

2008-12-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

This week's edition of "Face Connecticut," which airs Sunday at 6 a.m. on WTIC-AM and WTIC-FM, will feature a conversation about single-stream recycling and the closing of the Hartford landfill.

Speaking of single-stream recycling, our conversion to next-generation recycling is off to a great start. Already we're seeing double-digit-percent increases in recycling tonnages from towns such as Avon, Cromwell, Farmington, Newington and Vernon.

The more tons we recycle, the fewer tons of trash we're making. For towns that recycle with CRRA, it's simple math: trash costs upwards of $98.50 per ton to dispose of; recycling costs nothing or, in the case of our Mid-Connecticut Project recycling towns, earns $10 per ton for the town budget.

Fans wanted!

2008-11-05T11:50:00.000-08:00

The Garbage Museum has had visitors from every state in the union and countries around the world. Now everyone can connect to the Garbage Museum through its own Facebook page.

The museum’s Facebook page includes basic information about the museum and photographs of what visitors will find there. In the future, we’ll add pictures from special events and news about the museum.

Last year, a record 31,174 people took part in educational programs offered by the Garbage Museum, and we’re looking to break that record again this year. If you’ve never been there, plan a visit to the Garbage Museum now. And we hope everyone will check out its Facebook page and become a fan of the Garbage Museum.

Facility fire handled safely, plant running normally

2008-07-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

As was reported in the media yesterday, there was a minor fire at CRRA’s Mid-Connecticut Project trash-to-energy plant in Hartford.

Here is a full report on the incident:

At about 4:15 a.m. on July 30 a fire broke out in the scrubber atomizer housing associated with Boiler 13. The boiler is one of three located in the plant’s power-generation building (the other building is the waste processing facility, where trash is turned into the fuel used to generate electricity). Each boiler is serviced by a scrubber which cleans pollutants from the boiler’s emissions before they go to the smoke stack. As a result of our control systems, emissions from all of our trash-to-energy plants consistently are cleaner than state air-quality standards require.

The scrubber atomizer is used to spray a lime slurry into the flue gas stream to neutralize the acid gases generated during the trash-to-energy process. Wednesday’s fire occurred in a housing above the scrubber unit. The fire did not occur within the pollution control treatment train and did not enter the flue gas stream or the smoke stack.

Employees of Covanta Energy, which operates the plant for CRRA, called the Hartford Fire Department because of the smoke caused by the smoldering fire. The fire was out within two ours, and firefighters left the site at about 10:45 a.m. Covanta's safety procedures worked perfectly, no employees were injured and there was no need to evacuate the building.

The fire was caused by lubricating oil that had leaked into insulation in the housing above the scrubber atomizer unit. The atomizer has associated with it an ancillary piece of equipment – a gearbox – that operates the atomizer. The gearbox is located in a plenum above the scrubber unit. The gearbox is lubricated with oil, some of which leaked from the gearbox and migrated into the insulation. The oil eventually ignited as surfaces in the housing directly above the scrubber atomizer unit reach temperatures of 300 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

This incident did not interrupt facility operations. The trash kept moving, and the other two boilers continued to generate electricity. Boiler 13 was returned to service at 9:45 p.m. Wednesday, meaning it was out of service for less than 18 hours.

Does your school recycle?

2008-07-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

Meet CRRABlog’s friend Marion.

She stopped by the other day to show us something interesting. She had pulled together all the work her nine-year-old third-grader had brought home from school this past year. Before she recycled it, she put the pile on a scale, and it weighed 17 pounds!

This got both of us thinking: how many schools have recycling programs? How many schools have recycling bins in their classrooms and cafeterias? How many of those bins are actually used? Using 17 pounds per pupil, a K-6 elementary school with 20 children in each class and three classes of each grade should be recycling three and a half tons of paper each year!

Does your school have a recycling program? We’d like to hear if it does – or doesn’t! And if the answer is “no,” maybe CRRA can help. Our education staff is ready to work with schools to help kick-start their recycling programs. Contact the Garbage Museum in Stratford or the Trash Museum in Hartford to find out more.

From across the pond

2008-07-07T08:02:00.000-07:00

Came across an interesting story in The Sun, a London tabloid.

The headline: 'Green rage' is hitting Brits

Here's a sampling: A survey of 2,046 adults across the UK revealed people are so environmentally-conscious that one in three has been put off a friend, partner or colleague due to poor eco habits.

How long do you think it'll be until stories like this start popping up in the United States?

Closing the Hartford landfill

2008-07-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

These aerial photographs of the Hartford landfill offer a bird’s-eye view of closure activities there. Above, seven acres of the Hartford landfill ash area are seen at lower right. The black area is the plastic geomembrane, the orange area is drainage geocomposite, the tan area is drainage sand, the white stripe herringbone pattern is drainage pipe and the reddish color is cover soil. Below, 10 acres of the main landform are also being closed as seen lower right. The tan area on top of the black plastic is drainage sand and the white stripes are drainage pipes.

CRRA has begun closing the Hartford landfill.

Taking advantage of the fact that most of the landfill has already been filled to capacity with ash from the Mid-Connecticut Project trash-to-energy plant and stuff that can't be turned into electricity, two capping projects are under way. In fact, by next June CRRA expects to have capped 52 of the landfill's 96 acres.

In 2007, CRRA contracted with ET&L Corporation of Stow, Mass., to close the western half (approximately seven acres) of the 16-acre lined ash area. Plastic geomembrane installation is complete in the area and soil deployment is ongoing. The project is expected to reach substantial completion by August.

Also in 2007, CRRA contracted with R. Bates & Sons, Inc., of Clinton, Mass., to close approximately 45 acres (the south and west sides) of the 80-acre main landform and build a new access road on the landfill.

Plastic geomembrane installation is complete over approximately 11 acres in the southeast corner of the site. The contractor has begun deploying cover soils above the membrane and will soon begin placing and compacting approximately 44,000 cubic yards of soil necessary for the new access road. Once the new road is built, the contractor will begin capping the west side (the side facing Route 91) of the landfill.

Capping of all 45 acres is expected to be substantially complete by June 2009.

Closure of these 52 acres will require the importation of approximately 210,000 cubic yards of soil material. Closure of the remaining 44 acres of the landfill is scheduled to occur in 2009 and 2010.

Shameless plug dept.

2008-05-20T10:39:00.000-07:00

Paul Nonnenmacher, our Director of Public Affairs, recently spoke to the Goshen Library Directors about recycling, including CRRA's new single-stream recycling initiative.

Lynn Steinmayer, Director of the Goshen Public Library, summed up the presentation on her blog.

CRRA is eager to keep people informed about recycling, trash disposal and other important environmental issues. If your city or town -- or, for that matter, your school, civic organization or service club -- would like a presentation, please call Paul Nonnenmacher at (860) 757-7700.

Garbage Museum on radio

2008-05-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

Living on Earth, a nationally syndicated radio program that airs on WNPR-FM and about 300 other radio stations across the country, did a great feature on the Garbage Museum. The story takes you onto the tip floor of the adjacent recycling processing center and meets people as they checked out Trash-o-saurus and the museum's other exhibits.

You can hear the story by clicking on this link.

By the way, the story references a birthday party we had for Trash-o-saurus on May 10. Our museum is now home to a one-ton teenager.

In case you're planning ahead for 2009 . . .

2008-04-18T10:22:00.001-07:00

Earth Day is being celebrated all over Connecticut and around the country on April 22. Schools and environmental groups are preparing events to draw attention to improvements made in our environment and, more importantly, what all of us can do to keep that momentum going. More recently, businesses have been holding Earth Day celebrations for their employees.

One easy thing that everyone can do to help the environment is to recycle. And because CRRA is the state's leader in recycling education, we provide exhibits and educational programs for Earth Day events.

Unfortunately, in the last couple of weeks we've had to turn down many invitations to participate in events on Tuesday. We want to serve as many people as we can, and we offer these outreach programs year-round -- not just on Earth Day -- so if your school or business would like us to come to you with a fun, educational program on how we can all take better care of our Earth, please call us at (860) 757-7700 or e-mail crrainfo[at]crra.org and put "Outreach" in the subject line.

Happy Earth Day!

CRRA bringing the future of recycling to Connecticut

2008-04-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

CRRA is working on two fronts to bring the future of recycling to Connecticut.

Hartford pilot program

CRRA has joined forces with the City of Hartford and the National Recycling Partnership in an effort to help increase recycling participation and tonnages.

A pilot program funded by the National Recycling Partnership -– a coalition of grocery, food and beverage producers and retailers under the direction of the National Recycling Coalition -– will introduce single-stream recycling to about 5,000 households throughout the city. Unlike the familiar curbside recycling system, in which paper and cardboard are separated from bottles, cans and other containers, single-stream recycling means that a resident can put all his recyclables into the same barrel, making it easier for people to recycle. And because the Hartford system will use 64-gallon barrels, rather than the 14-gallon bins currently in use, people will be able to recycle more material.

“We value our relationships with our host communities, so we were delighted to be part of this effort to help Hartford improve its recycling,” said Thomas D. Kirk, CRRA president. “In many other cities, single-stream has dramatically improved recycling rates. We believe this is the future of recycling.”

CRRA’s Mid-Connecticut Project provides disposal of recyclables to Hartford and 69 other communities at its Hartford recycling facility, but because single-stream recyclables require different sorting and processing systems than the current dual-stream system, recyclables collected from homes participating in the pilot program will be delivered to a single-stream facility in Auburn, Mass.

CRRA provides its recycling services at no charge thanks to revenues from selling recyclables to companies who turn them into new products. To bring the pilot program to fruition, CRRA, the National Recycling Partnership and FCR, Inc., which operates CRRA’s recycling facility, reached an agreement which guaranteed CRRA would not lose any revenue during the program’s 12-month duration.

Single-stream for all Mid-Conn towns

Meanwhile, CRRA is moving toward retrofitting its Mid-Connecticut Project recycling center to accept single-stream recycling deliveries from all 70 Mid-Conn towns.

Earlier this month, the Policies & Procurement Committee of the CRRA board approved spending $3 million to retrofit the facility. The measure must still be approved by the full board at its meeting on April 24.

For more than a year, towns and private haulers from all over the state have been asking CRRA to switch to single-stream recycling. Haulers like it because they can automate their collections, meaning fewer worker injuries, lower worker's compensation costs and more efficient collections, while towns like it because they believe -- as does CRRA -- that single-stream will reduce the amount of trash they pay to dispose of while increasing (at least for Mid-Connecticut Project towns) the $10-per-ton rebate they receive for bringing their recyclables to CRRA.

We'll keep you posted.

News and notes

2008-04-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

We've always thought the Garbage Museum in Stratford was a pretty cool place. Now the Boston Globe says so, too! In Sunday's Globe there was a huge spread, taking up most of two pages, about the museum. You can see an on-line photo gallery here, and read the story here.

Have you been to the Garbage Museum? What did you think?

By the way, we'll be talking trash and recycling Wednesday morning on Hot 93.7! Make sure to tune in at about 7:15 a.m. and check us out with DJ Buck, Nancy B and Marv-Lo.

CRRA Annual Meeting

2008-03-17T07:07:00.000-07:00

CRRA recently held its fifth Annual Meeting for participating cities and towns.

CT-N recorded the meeting for broadcast. You can watch it on CT-N's Web site by clicking here.

Little things really can mean a lot

2008-03-11T11:33:00.001-07:00

This item has been on our "take a closer look" list for a while, and if you missed it, we think it's something you should think about, too.

Joann Klimkiewicz of the Hartford Courant came up with a great story last month about how making one small change in the way we do things can add up to real savings and real environmental benefits. Here's what they call in the newspaper business the "nut grafs":

"And so was born ChangeTheMargins.com, an Internet movement beseeching paper printers everywhere to whittle their default margin settings to .75 inches.

"Sounds insignificant. But the Green Destiny Council at Pennsylvania State University recently determined that if they could get page margins reduced to .75 inches campus-wide, it would amount to a savings of more than 45,000 reams of paper a year, and more than $120,000. Using that margin setting, the report said, could render a standard 100-page document to just 81 pages.

"Applying those settings to one ton of paper would save 19 reams, or 1.14 trees, according to Krinsky's calculations off the council's study. With about 5.4 million tons of office paper consumed annually, the new margin settings, according to Krinsky, could save about 6.15 million trees."

Most of us use Microsoft Word to write letters, reports and memos, and changing margins is easy to do. Just click on "File", then "Page Setup", then "Margins" and change the margins to .75 inches.

One of the most common questions we get at CRRA is how to get offices and businesses to recycle more. Many times, the answer involves getting a landlord or property manager to pay his trash hauler for a separate recycling pickup, which costs more money. But this is something everyone can do to conserve natural resources.

Does your office or school recycle? If not, have you tried to start a recycling program? Tell us about it!

And if you'd like to know more, check our post from Dec. 7, 2007, about educational programs for businesses.

B.Y.O.B.?

2008-02-06T12:34:00.001-08:00

That stands for "bring your own bag," which apparently more people are doing when they go shopping.

Today there were a couple of interesting stories in the newspapers predicting the demise of the plastic shopping bag.

The Washington Post ran a story headlined “Plastic Bags, Headed for a Meltdown” and the Hartford Courant had a piece headlined “Plastic Sacked”.

Both stories indicated that people are moving away from plastic bags and toward reusable bags made of cloth or recycled plastic, which many see as good news, because those plastic bags are made from crude oil.

Connecticut residents frequently ask whether those plastic bags are recyclable. While many stores will take back bags for recycling, towns served by our Bridgeport Project
and Mid-Connecticut Project mustn’t leave those bags in their curbside recycling bins. The reason is that the bags get tangled in the machinery our recycling centers use to sort and bale commodities before they’re shipped to processors to be turned into new products.

If you do get those plastic bags, they can be re-used. For example, at our Garbage Museum and Trash Museum our educators teach kids how to use them to in craft projects. The bags also come in handy for other, less attractive tasks. For example, we’ve met people who use them for cleaning up after their pets. You can also use them for trash disposal.

Now, from time to time you may hear concerns that these bags last forever in a landfill. In Connecticut, where trash goes to waste-to-energy plants, that doesn’t happen. And while open burning of these bags may release dangerous substances, the emissions control systems at our trash-to-energy plants remove those substances before they can get into the atmosphere. Check our emissions testing results and see for yourself.

By the way, paper bags are ideal for recycling newspapers, junk mail, catalogs, magazines, boxboard and other types of recyclable paper and cardboard. Just ask Phillup D. Bag!

Have you tried the new reusable shopping bags? What do you think? We’d like to know. Just post a comment here and tell us!

More praise for our education staff

2008-01-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

Joan writes:

We visited the CRRA Garbage Museum on Wednesday, January 2nd. We had about 55 children and adults attend. All of the children are in kindergarten, and many of them have a variety of special needs. The staff at the museum was ready and waiting for us when we arrived. My group of six children, who all have low attention levels, in addition to the already low attention level of a typical five year old!, had the most wonderful time. Our guide and teacher, Robin, was able to read the attention levels of my class wonderfully! She knew when she had their interest and could continue, and when it was time to move on! My class especially loved watching the payloader go back and forth under the "bridge" we were standing on and watching the activity below in the recycling area. They also enjoyed seeing the worms in the compost pile and the movie at the end.

In speaking with the other teachers and students who attended, we all agreed that it was a trip worthwhile, educational, and a "must do again" next year! One of the classes even created their own "Trash-a-saurus" on the bulletin board outside of their class!

Thanks for a wonderful and fun-learning morning!

By the way, we usually don't like to scoop ourselves, but in the next few days we'll be announcing that for the second consecutive year, participation in our educational programs set a new record, jumping more than 7 percent to over 53,000. Now we're looking for a "three-peat" in 2008!

“Non nella mia iarda posteriore.”

2008-01-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

That’s Italian for “not in my back yard.”

You may have noticed stories about a trash crisis in Naples, Italy, where garbage has been piling up on the streets because there was no place to dispose of it. The Associated Press reported on Jan. 6:

“Naples and other parts of the southern Campagna region have been plagued by a series of garbage crises for more than a decade. Dumps fill up and local communities block efforts to build new ones or create temporary storage sites . . . angry residents in the Pianura neighborhood blocked a street to protest the reopening of a long-closed dump.”

And on Jan. 8, the AP reported:

“Residents are updet by the uncollected trash but have blocked plans to create new dumps or reopen old sites, claiming health risks.”

Evidently, Italy has the same problem Connecticut has: everyone makes trash but nobody wants to give it a final resting place. Here in Connecticut, there hasn’t been any new disposal facility built in 10 years, even though we continue to produce more and more garbage.

As recently as 1997, Connecticut was bringing in trash from other states to fill its six waste-to-energy plants, but today we have to send more than 400,000 tons a year out of state because our plants have no more capacity.

The Italian government is faced with the same challenge, and Italian leaders appear to be ready to take the same steps Connecticut needs to take. Here’s more from the Jan. 8 AP dispatch:

“[Premier Romano] Prodi announced emergency and long-term measures to cope with the crisis, saying the objective of the strategy was to ‘make Italy completely self-sufficient in terms of garbage disposal, avoiding exportation.’ He said the area would get three new incinerators . . . Environment Minister Antonio Pecoraro Scanio has indicated that recycling and building technologically advanced incinerators are the only ways to help escape the mob’s hold on Naples’ garbage.”

As the Italians are now advocating, Connecticut has long used a system of recycling combined with trash-to-energy plants using state-of-the-art environmental controls (check the results of our emissions tests here) to dispose of its waste. Our system reduces by 90 percent the volume of material that must be landfilled and, despite the claims of some so-called “environmentalists” based on junk science and scare tactics, our system is the most environmentally-friendly cost-effective means of managing our trash.

You can get the facts about the trash-to-energy system on the CRRA Web site. Our Web site has lots of other information about trash, recycling and how we protect the environment.

Litigation and disposal fees

2007-12-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

In the last few days there have been news stories (like this and this and this reporting that the 70 Mid-Connecticut Project towns will be getting their shares of $35.9 million awarded to them by a Superior Court judge as a result of New Hartford v. CRRA.

For the most part, reporters have done a good job of trying to understand this case and then distill it into the limited space they have to tell their stories. One of the beauties of a blog like this is that we’re freed of space restrictions, so we can fully explain some of the points touched on briefly in the news coverage.

The main point that needs more detailed explanation today is the relationship between this lawsuit and our disposal fee -– the price we charge municipalities and haulers for disposing of trash they collect. More to the point, we’d like to explain how the $35.9 million award would be used to benefit those 70 cities and towns.

CRRA is completely self-funded. Our trash-to-energy projects have to cover all their costs with revenue from just two sources -– electric sales and trash disposal fees. Our electric revenues are fixed with multi-year contracts, so the only variable we can adjust from year to year is the disposal fee.

When our costs drop, our disposal fee drops. When our costs increase, we must increase our disposal fee to cover those costs. And in fiscal year 2009 (which starts July 1, 2008), our Mid-Connecticut Project’s costs are going to increase substantially due to the closure of the Hartford landfill. Take a look at this graph:

What you see here is a breakdown of costs associated with closing the Hartford landfill. The Mid-Connecticut Project has used the Hartford landfill since the 1980s, so the Project, and by extension its towns, is responsible for closing it properly. By December 2008, the Hartford landfill will reach its permitted capacity, so CRRA will have to close it with a geosynthetic cap, then pay for 30 years of post-closure monitoring and maintenance. Our latest figures show the closure and post-closure costs will run between $40 million and $45 million. That is represented by the turquoise segments of the bars on this graph.

Currently, the landfill accepts ash, which is a by-product of trash-to-energy, and non-processible waste – material that can’t be burned to generate electricity. When the landfill closes, we’ll have to truck all that material to another site, most likely a privately-owned landfill in another state, and those costs are represented by the violet and cream-colored segments of the bars on the graph.

Right now, all those costs add up to about $112 million.

So what does this have to do with New Hartford v. CRRA? The money awarded to the Mid-Connecticut Project towns -– and it’s important to note none of the other CRRA projects was impacted at all by either the Enron bankruptcy or this litigation -– was money CRRA had been holding in reserve to help pay for those costs. But with that $35.9 million gone (until we prevail in our appeal, which we expect to do) we have almost nothing in the bank. This graph compares our reserves to those future costs:

You may be wondering what kind of difference $35.9 million would make against $112 million in costs. CRRA still is pursuing lawsuits against 11 banks involved in the Enron transaction, and we believe those actions will bring us tens of millions more dollars.

Those lawsuits, by the way, are a primary reason for our appealing the New Hartford ruling. That ruling contains language which would seriously damage our cases against those banks, so if we didn’t appeal we’d be leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table, all of which would be used to absorb these increasing costs.

The bottom line is this: the towns will receive money through this lawsuit, but they’ll be paying it back in higher disposal fees. If we still had those reserves, they’d be used to offset these cost increases.

Educational programs for businesses?

2007-12-07T10:47:00.000-08:00

Jenny wrote:

“Are there programs at either the Hartford or Stratford museums targeted at teaching business people about waste reduction and diversion?”

Good question. Each year the Trash Museum in Hartford and the Garbage Museum in Stratford teach more than 50,000 people – mostly school-age children – the five R’s of solid waste, namely “reduce, reuse, recycle, recover and rethink.” We don’t have any programs specifically for business people, but if your company is interested we could certainly modify one of our existing programs to work with an adult audience.

To find out more, call Sotoria Montanari, our education supervisor, at (860) 757-7764.

And if there's something you'd like to know or have an idea for CRRA, send an e-mail to crrainfo(at)crra.org -- just make sure you put the word "CRRABlog" in your subject line.

Junk science and scare tactics

2007-12-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

Recently we’ve come across a couple of instances where self-styled environmentalists cherry-pick facts and use junk science in an attempt to needlessly scare people about trash-to-energy. There is an abundance of air emission data in the public domain. Depending on what one wants to show, one can choose data sets to suit one’s purpose.

The Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection’s Title V Emissions Inventory collects data on criteria pollutants. Criteria pollutants are a group of air pollutants that can cause smog, acid rain and adverse health effects. The six criteria pollutants about which DEP gathers information are nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (which can form ozone), sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and lead. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established National Ambient Air Quality Standards for each of the criteria pollutants. Connecticut is in attainment with all of these except for ozone and parts of Connecticut are not in attainment of the standard for fine particulates.

There were six industrial sources of criteria pollutants given in the 2003 Title V Emission Inventory for the City of Hartford. CRRA’s Mid-Connecticut facility is the largest of these and accounts for the largest share of these emissions, mostly nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide. The Mid-Connecticut Project trash-to-energy facility is in compliance with all provisions of its state and federal air permits and all applicable air regulations and standards. This facility is regularly inspected by DEP and has an excellent record of environmental performance and safety.

Click here for results of emissions tests of all CRRA trash-to-energy facilities dating back to 2001. See for yourself.

It must be noted that there are many other sources of air pollution in Hartford such as the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks that use I-91, I-84 and the streets of the city every day. There are numerous businesses whose air emissions fall below the Title V reporting threshold. These sources do not show up at all in the DEP’s Title V Emissions Inventory.

Looking at the same 2003 Title V Emission inventory for the City of Bridgeport shows four industrial sources of criteria pollutants. CRRA’s Bridgeport facility accounts for less than 20 percent of these. Once again, this facility is in full compliance with all applicable emissions limits. Meanwhile, I-95, spanning the breadth of Fairfield County, is one of the most congested freeways in the United States.

While criteria pollutants are a concern, the EPA has designated over 650 toxic chemicals for reporting under the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA). Facilities who deal in large quantities of these toxic chemicals are required to annually report their releases to the environment. In 2005, the latest year for which Toxic Release Inventory data is available, 1,266,576 pounds (633 tons) of these were released to the environment in Hartford County alone by 95 different facilities. These chemicals include aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals. CRRA’s Mid-Connecticut RRF is not responsible for a single pound of these toxic releases.

A similar picture is seen in Bridgeport. In 2005, the latest year for which Toxic Release Inventory data is available, 618,859 pounds (309 tons) of these were released to the environment in Fairfield County alone by 65 different facilities. These chemicals include aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals. CRRA’s Bridgeport RRF is not responsible for a single pound of these toxic releases.

There are many ways to look at air emissions. Looking at sources within a particular city’s limits makes little sense when a breeze can carry pollutants across borders. Typically, environmental professionals speak of “airsheds,” larger areas that are subject to the same forces of pollutant transport, industrial activity and weather. Efforts to control nitrogen oxides are undertaken on a regional basis encompassing dozens of states in the eastern United States.

CRRA’s four trash-to-energy facilities serve a vital purpose by safely disposing of most of Connecticut’s solid waste while at the same time generating electricity that would otherwise come from imported oil. There are air emissions from these operations. They are carefully limited, lawfully permitted and continuously monitored. The alternative to WTE is landfilling garbage, which then decomposes into methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Connecticut’s trash-to-energy facilities are an asset to the state that we can be proud of.

Click here to get the facts about Connecticut's trash-to-energy plants.

A question about electronics

2007-11-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

Lauren asks:

Where can a business recycle electronics in Connecticut? Most electronics recycling companies only offer their services to residents.

Good question. CRRA holds a limited number of electronics recycling collections for residents of its participating towns. Since we instituted this program in 1999, we've kept more than 3 million pounds of old televisions, computer equipment, VCRs and other devices out of our trash-to-energy plants. We'll announce another series of collections in 2008.

Businesses pose a special challenge because, in many cases, even a small company might change out 15 or 20 computers all at once, but the good news is that more and more electronics companies are getting into recycling. You can find out some of them on CRRA's Web site.

By the way, this story in yesterday's Danbury News-Times doesn't pertain to our programs. CRRA's electronics go to a company called Amandi Services which has a disassembly facility in Pennsylvania. You can find out more about Amandi's electronics recycling process here. You'll be impressed.

In the news

2007-11-19T13:34:00.000-08:00

The Hartford Business Journal ran this story about the latest developments in New Hartford v. CRRA today.

Stories have also appeared in the New Haven Register and the Connecticut Post

Teaching kids who teach the world

2007-11-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

There's a terrific story in this morning's New Haven Register about six-year-old Cole Johnson of East Haven who, according to the story, was "bitten by the recycling bug during a visit to the Children’s Garbage Museum adjacent to the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority’s recycling facility in Stratford."

Now he's trying to get his school to expand its recycling program. Way to go, Cole!

Each year CRRA's education centers teach more than 50,000 people how to protect their environment with recycling and environmentally responsible waste disposal. We've always believed that if we teach children about recycling, they'll go and teach the grownups, and here's more evidence of that.

A question about plastics

2007-11-15T10:29:00.000-08:00

Michele from Wilton, Conn., writes:

hello
I think your website is great - thanks for all of the information.

Why is it that only plastics #1 and #2 are accepted for recycling (So many food containers are #5 for example). Is there anywhere else to recycle the other numbered plastic items?

Also, if plastics with other numbers (like 5) are accidentally included in recycling are they seperated out somehow at your facility or at the town transfer station? If they are not seperated out do they contaminate the recycled matter?

This is a question CRRA hears frequently. The good news here is that people want to recycle more, but recycling is to a large extent driven by economics. We can take anything we want out of the waste stream, but unless someone wants it sooner or later it will wind up in the trash. At CRRA's recycling facilities in Hartford and Stratford, plastics #1 and #2 are sorted and baled for shipping to processors who turn them into new products -- #1 plastic is reformulated into fibers that are spun into fleece and carpeting, while #2 can be reformulated into a solid used in artificial lumber for playscapes and decks.

Processors pay for those plastics -- in many instances more than $300 a ton -- because they can be turned into new saleable materials. But the technology hasn't advanced to making recycling other types of plastics economically viable.

While we're on the subject of economics, CRRA has always provided its participating towns with free recycling (a substantial savings when compared to paying current fees of as much as $84 a ton for trash disposal) and now pays its Mid-Connecticut Project towns $10 a ton for all the recyclables they deliver to CRRA.

We can do this because of the revenue we receive from the sale of plastics and other materials such as paper, cardboard, steel and aluminum. There has been talk of expanding the bottle bill to include plastic water bottles, which are made of #1 plastic. Because the deposit system operates outside the established recycling program, CRRA would lose about $300,000 a year in plastic sales, hurting these important, convenient programs.

A word about our museums

2007-11-12T05:44:00.000-08:00

This note came to us over the weekend:

I recently toured the CRRA facilities and found it fascinating! It has helped me as a teacher as well as personally. I learned so much from the tour and look forward to incorporating this information into my home as well as my Art room!

Kristen

CRRA's Trash Museum in Hartford and Garbage Museum in Stratford offer behind-the-scenes looks at what happens to your recylables after they're picked up at the curb or from your town drop-off center. To find out more, click here. And thanks, Kristen, for your kind words!

Phil gets hot with Hot 93.7

2007-11-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

Phillup D. Bag, CRRA's recycling expert, joined Sotoria Montanari and Paul Nonnenmacher of CRRA with the Hot 93.7 Morning Crew Thursday morning. Phil, Sotoria and Paul talked about recycling and the environment with dj Buck, Mary-B and Marv-Lo.

You can hear a podcast of their interview on this page at the Hot 93.7 Web site. The CRRA crew came on right after WWE superstar Batista's interview.

Thanks to Hot 93.7 for helping CRRA spread the word about recycling!

Did any of you catch the interview? What did you think?

CRRA's Web site

2007-11-01T07:14:00.000-07:00

At CRRA, we're pretty proud of our Web site. We believe it has everything anyone would want to know about CRRA, trash disposal, recycling and how they all work together to protect our environment. We think it helps us set a standard for openness and transparency among public agencies.

That doesn't mean we're satisfied with our Web presence. We're getting ready to do some modifications, but as we think through the possibilities, we'd like your ideas.

What would you like to see added or changed to our Web site?

New Hartford v. CRRA

2007-10-25T07:19:00.000-07:00

The Waterbury Republican-American published this editorial on Wednesday, Oct. 24:

Towns should stop suing themselves

The class-action lawsuit pitting 70 Connecticut towns against the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority comes down to a loss of trust and the lawsuit industry's eagerness to exploit conflict. Little good is likely to come of it.

CRRA lost $220 million in making a fiscally and ethically dubious loan to now-defunct Enron Corp. The agency and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal are trying to recover as much of that money as they can through litigation. The towns sued CRRA last year, claiming it should give them some of the money it has recovered because it double-dipped — covering its losses through tipping-fee increases while getting some of the money back in court.

CRRA officials say, correctly, the towns are suing themselves. That's because the $35.9 million they won in court ultimately will go back to the CRRA, either through successful appeals or further tipping-fee increases. Indeed, CRRA has prepared a chart that shows fees ranging from $69 to $80 per ton from 2008-13 if it wins the appeal, and from $86 to $89 from 2009-12 if it loses.

Perhaps even worse, if CRRA disburses the money to the towns and subsequently wins its appeal, the towns will have to give the money back — minus an unrecoverable $10 million to $12 million paid to lawyers.

But even that is not the worst of it. Those guarding the diminishing Enron stash will hold up the $35.9 million payment as evidence CRRA is not entitled to further damage claims.

CRRA is a quasi-public agency that exists to serve the towns by disposing of their trash and garbage. If CRRA and the towns trusted each other's motives and analysis, the lawsuit never would have been filed. In this respect, Superior Court Judge Dennis G. Eveleigh did no one (except the lawyers) any favors by imposing a months-long gag order on the parties that blocked any effort by either side to restore trust.

CRRA is right to fight this ruling to protect its own interests and those of its client towns. The towns' position is understandable; CRRA lost their trust the day the Enron loan went sour and won't get it back overnight. But it's no less true that both sides are destined to come out of this dispute a little lighter in the wallet thanks to the machinations of the lawsuit industry.

Where does your garbage go?

2007-10-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

A story in this morning's Hartford Courant includes a common misconception about Connecticut's garbage system:

Bags wind up in our landfills; in our oceans, killing sea life; and, as Alan Ball demonstrated in his 1999 film "American Beauty," in our streets and courtyards, circling like kites or bubbles in passing air currents.

Just about everything Connecticut residents throw away -- which we should do only if it can't be re-used or recycled -- winds up in a trash-to-energy plant. All that winds up in a landfill is the ash produced by combusting trash, and between recycling and trash-to-energy we reduce by 90 percent the amount of stuff we're actually landfilling.

Want to know more? Check our Web site or click here for a slide show on the trash-to-energy process. The slide show is a pretty large file so it will take some time to load, but we think you'll find it interesting.

How many of you are using the new re-usable grocery bags?

Regulation?

2007-10-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

A proposal by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for the Department of Public Utility Control to regulate garbage disposal continues to generate interest. For instance, it was the subject of this editorial in the Connecticut section of the New York Times on Sunday, Sept. 30, and there is more news coverage to come.

Attorney General Blumenthal announced his proposal after discussing the matter with a group of Fairfield County mayors and first selectmen, who explained to him that the operator of the Bridgeport trash-to-energy plant could have a de facto unregulated monopoly on trash disposal starting January 1, 2009, when it can take full control of the facility.

Read the Attorney General’s news release here.

Connecticut has six trash-to-energy plants that process about 90 percent of the state’s non-recycled garbage. Within 10 years, five of those plants could be completely under private control, meaning their owners could charge whatever they feel the market would bear.

Trash disposal is vital to protecting the environment and public health. It is an essential public service.

At the center of Blumenthal’s argument is the fact that there are no other disposal facilities in southwestern Connecticut, and it is apparent that no new trash-to-energy plants or solid waste landfills will be built in Connecticut, so towns in that part of the state will have two choices: do business with the Bridgeport plant or ship their trash by truck or rail to a landfill in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Virginia. CRRA has contended for years that relying on out-of-state facilities would mean the people of Connecticut would have no control over how their trash is disposed of (do other states have the same strict environmental safeguards as Connecticut?) or how much it would cost (could other states impose new taxes on out-of-state trash haulers? And what about the cost of diesel fuel?).

Adding trash disposal to DPUC’s list of responsibilities would require legislation. Such oversight would need to be managed within the towns’ flow-control rights as granted by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Since 1988, CRRA has had a contract with Wheelabrator, which runs the Bridgeport plant, to take garbage from 18 CRRA member cities and towns in southwestern Connecticut. When that contract expires, on December 31, 2008, the plant ownership will transfer to Wheelabrator. Unless we negotiate a new or extended renewal agreement with Wheelabrator, the plant will be Wheelabrator’s to use as it pleases.

CRRA is in good-faith negotiations with Wheelabrator, and a successful resolution of those negotiations – a long-term contract at a below-market price – is our goal and our preference. Further, we are optimistic about reaching an agreement in the next two or three months. The Attorney General’s proposal does not impact or interfere with CRRA’s initative to negotiate an agreement renewal. We are here to serve the towns’ best interests, and that long-term below-market contract we’re working toward would accomplish that mission.

We do need to clarify a couple of misconceptions that have arisen in the press coverage of this proposal:
• First, some of the press accounts seemed to confuse disposal with hauling. A hauler – either your city or town or a private company – collects your trash at the curb and brings it to us for disposal. CRRA is not a hauler. The Attorney General has also called for stricter oversight of the hauling industry.
• Second, CRRA, contrary to one report, operates under plenty of oversight. Our Board of Directors – mainly mayors and first selectmen of cities and towns we serve – is appointed by the Governor and legislative leadership. And we will compare our record of openness and transparency with any other public entity.

We should point out that the Mid-Connecticut Project trash-to-energy facility in Hartford is owned by CRRA lock, stock and barrel, and barring any unforeseen circumstances it will be publicly owned permanently.

What do you think? Click on the word "comments" below to tell us.

New attraction at the Trash Museum

2007-09-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

There’s a new attraction at the Trash Museum in Hartford that gives visitors an up-close look at CRRA’s state-of-the-art recycling processing center.

Nine closed-circuit television cameras feed video of various stages of the recycling processes to large monitors installed in the viewing area overlooking the processing center.

The new closed-circuit system was installed after the installation of new recycling equipment in the processing facility. Previously, visitors could clearly see the processes from the viewing area, but the new processing equipment doesn’t allow the same sight lines.

On a split-screen monitor, viewers can see the action of the recycling processing from each of the nine cameras. Conveyor belts, plastic optic sorting, paper screeners and bales of each commodity are examples of the new sorting technology. Additionally, there is on-going truck traffic where recyclables are dumped onto the tipping floor and then pushed onto a conveyor belt by a payloader.

The new camera exhibit offers a variety of features that enhance the educational experience of the groups. Educators leading tours can toggle through the images and zoom camera views in and out as on-lookers learn about the sorting process. A larger image may be projected onto the adjacent wall so that the process may be further explained. Placed over the mock bales in the museum are monitors displaying the sorting process of that particular commodity.

The Trash Museum is located at 211 Murphy Road in Hartford’s South Meadows. For contact information, directions and hours of operation, click on this link:
http://www.crra.org/pages/edu_contact_htfd.htm

Welcome!

2007-09-19T12:14:00.000-07:00

At the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, we do everything we can to communicate with the people of Connecticut, and we have always encouraged people to communicate with us. Our Board of Directors meetings are open to the public and the first item of business is almost always public comment. We hold public meetings and presentations throughout the state and welcome questions from those in attendance.

But we know you can't always get to those meetings, and you may not be able to get through when we're on a radio or television talk show, so we're introducing CRRABlog (crab on top of a log -- get it?) as another means of stimulating dialogue between CRRA and the people we serve.

Here's how it's going to work: we'll tell you what we're thinking, then you tell us what you're thinking. We will moderate comments, but only to make sure nothing inappropriate or offensive is posted.