Latest News

We are excited to announce that Ben Hoy - Manager of the Walpole Recycling Center, Director of the Alstead-Langson Transfer Station, and NRRA Board Member - has joined the New Hampshire Solid Waste Working Group (SWWG). Ben was nominated by the NH Municipal Association as the representative for rural communities that source separate recycling. The Solid Waste Working Group's responsibilities include reviewing and making changes to the state's solid waste reduction, recycling, and management policies, programs, goals, and initiatives. This includes the latest NH Solid Waste Management Plan, which was released earlier this fall. The...

The following article was written by NRRA Communications Manager, Andrea Folsom, and first appeared in the October 2022 issue of Resource Recycling. How do we get folks to stop tossing trash and contaminating our recycling loads? How can we get more of our residents to recycle? These two questions have been answered over the years by large outreach campaigns designed for cities and towns that use zero-sort or single-stream recycling. Unfortunately, it’s been rare to see such a campaign created for communities that use source-separated recycling – in these systems, residents are asked to separate their recyclables into two or more...

UPDATE 12/19/22: The EPA has EXTENDED the Grant Application Due Date. GRANT APPLICATIONS ARE NOW DUE FEBRUARY 15, 2023. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released new recycling grant opportunities funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Through the Recycling Education and Outreach grant program, towns and cities can apply for grants between $250,000 and $2 million to improve consumer education and outreach on waste prevention, reuse, recycling, and composting. Through the Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grant program, towns and cities can apply for grants between $500,000 and $4 million to improve materials...

EPSOM, NH: The Northeast Resource Recovery Association (NRRA), the largest and oldest cooperative-model recycling nonprofit in the United States, enables communities to manage their own recycling programs, in part, through its recycling education and technical assistance work. This fall, NRRA successfully wrapped up its Recycling with Results projects and immediately began the new Recycling Tools of the Trade project, both which were made possible by a grant from the Rural Utilities Service, United States Department of Agriculture. The Recycling with Results project included the popular four-month-long digital Recycle Right Campaign...

NRRA staff, Board of Trustees, and voting municipal members gathered on Wednesday, November 9 at the Puritan Backroom conference center to celebrate this year's NRRA award winners, hear from three of our exceptional vendors, and vote on the new Board of Trustees slate. NRRA Executive Director, Reagan Bissonnette, opened the meeting highlighting the thing that makes NRRA so special: our municipal members. Not just a place for community gathering, the transfer stations and recycling centers across the Northeast - and operators who run them - are sites of innovation, making tangible, positive change within their communities. Last year...

NRRA Executive Director Reagan Bissonnette was recently invited to speak at the Solid Waste Advisory Committee meeting hosted by the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection. She shared market insights from NRRA's experience as the oldest and largest recycling cooperative in the United States, including why recycling markets are currently down. In addition, she shared information about plastics recycling in light of recent negative news stories from NPR ( Recycling plastic is practically impossible – and the problem is getting worse) and other news outlets based on a new Greenpeace report. While plastics recycling...

The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) has issued the 2020-2021 Biennial Solid Waste Report. The key purpose of the document is to report New Hampshire’s progress toward reaching the solid waste reduction goal to reduce the quantity by weight of solid waste disposed by 25 percent by the year 2030, and by 45 percent by the year 2050. The report provides strategies for achieving the goal, as well as a summary of the Solid Waste Management Bureau activities during calendar years 2020 and 2021. NRRA has compiled some key takeaways from the report. Solid waste generated per person: NHDES estimates that in 2020...

Recently, NRRA's Senior Member Services Representative, Bonnie Bethune, joined two NRRA board members and other amazing women in the business of solid waste and recycling on a panel discussion hosted by the NH Department of Environmental Services. The goal of the "Wonder Women of Solid Waste" Solid Waste Operator Training was to learn from speakers and encourage more women to join the solid waste industry. Many panelists started working in other roles with their town and then grew into their position. With several decades of experience among them, these women shared a wonderful depth of insight and thought about their roles and...

NRRA staff recently spoke with a member community whose recycling committee and select board were shocked to learn that their community's costs for curbside single stream recycling is now one third more than their cost to dispose of trash. While the community doesn't market their curbside recycling through NRRA, they reached out to NRRA as a trusted resource to understand what's happening with recycling markets. The following information and charts are designed to help NRRA members understand the current recycling markets and share accurate information with local decision-makers in your community. The Short Answer: The economy is...

On October 12, the NRRA staff and Facility Operators from New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts boarded a bus at 8:30am on the Fall Bus Tour. The plan for the day included a tour of the WIN Waste Wheelabrator Waste-to-Energy plant in Penacook, NH, followed by a tour of the newly-updated Gilford, NH Solid Waste Center. In a follow up survey, it's clear the day was a win for all involved! Participants enjoyed getting an insider's look into how the WIN Waste facility worked: "It was very interesting to see the operations of the place and how we could really have a viable solution to our decreasing landfill space and higher power...