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On April 18th -- in honor of Earth Day and Week -- NRRA kicked off week one of the 16-week Recycle Right Campaign! As part of the campaign, we also hosted our first Ask Me Anything: Recycling Edition event online. There were dozens of great audience-submitted questions that our panel of recycling experts answered over the course of an hour. Watch and share the full Recycling AMA event video, including subtitles.
The Recycle Right Campaign has been created and designed to be shared -- in emails, on websites, and across social media. The social posts you see below were posted on Facebook and Instagram over the course of the previous week. You can share them directly on social media, or download the images and text to use in your own Recycle Right Campaign....Read more
Recycling facility operators and staff were interested to share ideas at the April 13 th Members/Operations Marketing (MOM) meeting held virtually. Heather Herring, Member Services Representative at NRRA, first asked the membership via email: “How do you decide what your fee structure is for items at your Transfer Station?” and “Do you update these fees annually or….never?” Members responded to the listserv and during the meeting to compare notes. It really comes down to each town’s disposal fee philosophy. How much is your town paying in taxes, what does your selectboard want, and do the selectboard members use the facility and see the results?
Hampton, NH explained their process for evaluating disposal fees. They compare what residents paid in fees to what the town paid the vendor to dispose the items. If the values are very close, they don’t change the fee. If they spent thousands...Read more
The recycling nonprofit Northeast Resource Recovery Association (NRRA) will be holding its annual Recycling Conference & Expo on Monday, May 16 and Tuesday, May 17, 2022. For over forty years, NRRA’s Recycling Conference & Expo has been a premier conference focused exclusively on municipal recycling and waste reduction in the Northeast. This year’s theme, “ What’s Next: Rethinking Resource Recovery ” emphasizes the need for communities to rethink the future of solid waste and waste reduction and reset following the pandemic and China’s National Sword policy.
Each year, hundreds of attendees join from across the recycling and waste management industry, including leaders and decisionmakers from municipal recycling centers and transfer stations, state, city, and town governments, and business and industry. This year’s conference will be held in person again! The conference will take place at the DoubleTree by Hilton Manchester Downtown Hotel in Manchester, NH for two full days...Read more
On April 7, the Environmental Business Council's 8th annual "Talking Trash" Conference Northern New England was held in person again after two years of being held remotely. Seventy attendees gathered in Manchester, New Hampshire to hear updates about solid waste challenges and opportunities affecting the region. NRRA and SWANA Northern New England Chapter partnered with EBC to plan the conference, which was co-chaired by Reagan Bissonnette, Executive Director of NRRA, Michael Roether, Senior Project Manager of Weston & Sampson, and Paul Schmidt, Vice President of CMA Engineers, Inc.
The following six presenters provided state, federal and industry updates, and all answered audience questions during two lively Q&A panel discussions following the presentations.
Josh Kelly , Solid Waste Program Manager, VT Department of Environmental Conservation Michael J. Wimsatt, P.G., Director, Waste Management Division, NH Department of Environmental Services Paula Clark , Director, Division of Materials Management, Bureau of Remediation...Read more
On March 22, 2022, amendments to the NH Code of Admin Rules for composting facilities became effective. The rule changes by the NH Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) are intended to clarify and simplify requirements for operating composting facilities in New Hampshire, including requirements related to composting meat and dairy products. The new rules provide more flexibility for permit-by-notification composting facilities, and also add some key permit exemptions for small-scale food waste composting efforts.
Stakeholders had been eagerly waiting for proposed revisions to New Hampshire's composting regulations. Previously, in order for a solid waste facility to compost meat and dairy products in New Hampshire, it had to undergo an extensive and expensive permit process. This and other impediments resulted in very few facilities in New Hampshire composting meat and dairy products on site.
Learn more about the new composting rules at NRRA's Recycling...Read more
UPDATE: The Recycling AMA Video is now available in full with subtitles.
Have you ever wished you could ask all of your recycling questions to a panel of experts? Now is your chance!
Our Ask Me Anything: Recycling Edition panel of experts will tackle questions such as - what do those chasing arrows mean? Do egg cartons get recycled with paper or cardboard? Is recycling even worth it? And much, much more!
This online event is free and open to the public on Thursday, April 21 from 12 to 1 PM EST – invite your friends, neighbors, and community.
Registration required. All registrants will receive a link to the video recording afterward and are encouraged to send in their recycling questions regardless of whether or not they are able to join us live.
This event also qualifies for one credit...Read more
At the March 9th MOM meeting, NRRA members gathered at the Windham Solid Waste Management District (WSWMD) to hear Bob Spencer talk about several of their programs, including their new tire consolidation program. Small towns usually take many months or a year to collect enough tires to meet the minimum requirements for NRRA’s vendors to pick up the tires for recycling. In response to this challenge, WSWMD generously created a new space with already existing cement dividers where its member communities could deliver tires for consolidation. This location is easily accessible for the NRRA vendor's truck equipped with a crane to pick up the tires much faster than by hand. Now district towns Dover, Jamaica, Readsboro, Stratton, Townshend, Wardsboro and Wilmington deliver tires to the WSWMD in Brattleboro to be consolidated. They have already had one 19-ton tire pickup with their new program. It is a win/win for both the...Read more
The NH Solid Waste Working Group , which is responsible for assisting the NH Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) with solid waste planning and policy initiatives, held another meeting on March 25. Reagan Bissonnette, NRRA Executive Director, presented about how NRRA assists NH communities with recycling and Steve Poggi, Waste Management Area Director of Disposal Operations, presented about NH communities manage their trash. Then the group formed three subcommittees to assist NHDES with updating NH's Solid Waste Plan.
As part of her presentation, Reagan explained how NRRA membership includes 85% of all towns and cities in NH. NRRA is one of only a handful of nonprofits in the country that operates a recyclables marketing cooperative, and Reagan shared how NRRA helps connect municipalities to vendors that process recyclables and turn them into new products and packaging. In particular, transportation costs and logistics are a meaningful consideration for communities...Read more
NRRA members were pleased to meet in person on March 9th at the Windham Solid Waste Management District (WSWMD) and gather around a table to discuss recycling markets and composting. After several great discussions during the Member Operations Marketing (MOM) meeting, we joined Executive Director Bob Spencer for a tour of the facility in Brattleboro, VT.
In 2011, WSWMD began to collect organics and in 2012 they started a curbside collection program and sent the material to Martin's Farm in Greenfield, MA. Eventually, they opened a site in Windham to collect organics locally. The greatest incentive to increase recycling and composting was in 2015 when Pay As You Throw (PAYT) became mandatory in Vermont. With education and an economic incentive, more reluctant recycler residents began to bring in organic material and recyclables to divert from the weight of the municipal waste. In 2017, WSWMD voted to change from a...Read more
At NRRA’s Member Operations Marketing (MOM) meeting on February 9, 2022, Bonnie Bethune, NRRA Senior Member Services Representative, shared four graphs to demonstrate trends in market pricing for fibers, scrap metal, aluminum cans, and plastics from 2018 to present. A picture is worth a thousand words, and these pricing charts show that despite some recent dips in market pricing, overall recycling commodity markets are either similar to or higher than the same time in 2018.
Some of the key highlights from these graphs include the following.
Fibers : Though somewhat lower than similar 2018 pricing, cardboard and mixed paper show recent improved pricing with a current steady pricing trend. Scrap Metal : Pricing is currently slightly above 2018 pricing with signs of strengthening markets. Aluminum Cans : Pricing is currently slightly above 2018 pricing, also with signs of strengthening markets. Plastics : After historically high summer 2021 pricing,...Read more