An Independent-minded calendar of arts and events for Outer Cape Cod

Advertise in the Indie.

Reach more readers from Eastham to Provincetown.

Unchained news for Outer Cape Cod

The Provincetown Independent

Let us bring you the paper.

Your subscription supports real community journalism.

recycling

    ENVIRONMENT

    A Tale of Two Recycling Systems

    Wellfleet’s multi-stream approach wins on price and efficiency, while other towns opt for ease

    By

    WELLFLEET — If there’s one thing Cape Codders can be proud of, it’s being good recyclers. That’s according to Kari Parcell, whose job is to be picky. Parcell is the waste reduction coordinator for Barnstable County Cape Cod Cooperative Extension.

    Wellfleet uses a multi-stream recycling system, which involves careful separation of items and attention to the market for waste. It results in lower costs and more efficient recycling. (Photo by William von Herff)

    The contamination rate in recycling streams across the country is around 25 percent, according to the National Waste & Recycling Association. But a 2022 waste audit in Wellfleet found contamination rates in the glass and plastic streams here at only 17 percent, said Transfer Station Foreman Michael Cicale. Provincetown, too, is under that national number. Casella Waste Systems, which takes the town’s recycling, permits only a 20-percent contamination rate, which the town hasn’t exceeded in recent history, according to DPW Deputy Director Sherry Prada.

    On Cape Cod, “if something is recyclable, it’s most likely going to go into the correct bin and it’s going to get recycled,” Parcell said. “But we can always do better.”

    One way to improve the quality of recycling is to subdivide the streams. For one thing, Parcell said, when people separate recycling into different containers, they become more aware of what they are recycling, and that can prevent “wish-cycling.”

    Multi-stream recycling is also cheaper than the single-stream approach. It allows towns to follow the markets to look for better deals on what they need to unload. Wellfleet has stuck with a multi-stream approach since the towns introduced municipal recycling in the 1970s.

    About single-stream systems, Cicale said, “If you can imagine buying a bag of flour at the supermarket, but it’s full of junk, you’re not going to be able to bake a very good cake with it.” He said that it’s important to remember that recyclable materials are commodities. “It might be trash to you, but it’s a raw material to someone else down the line,” he said.

    Those facts notwithstanding, Provincetown switched to single stream in 2013, and Truro followed suit in 2016. In both towns, all the recycling is thrown together, shipped out, and later separated at a materials recovery facility known as an MRF.

    Single stream, Parcell said, takes less effort. This is particularly helpful in a town like Truro, she said, which has a small transfer station. It’s also seen as more convenient for townspeople. Prada said the system increased the number of households that recycle their goods, though she did not have the numbers available.

    More recycling is desirable, but although it used to save towns money to recycle, it has ended up costing them. That’s the result of changes in global markets for the recyclables.

     

    Different Streams

    When single-stream recycling was introduced in the 1990s, Parcell said, recycling was at its cheapest. About 80 percent of global recycling went to China, where the market for recyclable materials had just opened up, and Chinese companies would pay even for streams with contamination rates as high as 75 or 80 percent, she said.

    Provincetown’s single-stream system is easy. The sorting is done at the Casella facility in Boston. It’s more expensive and results in less efficient recycling. (Photo courtesy Casella Waste Systems)

    Then, in 2018, the Chinese government decided to lower the limit on contamination to 0.5 percent, which effectively ended all imports of foreign recycling. The change meant more recycling was shipped domestically and to countries like India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, Parcell said. And recycling became significantly more expensive.

    Currently, according to Prada, Provincetown pays $76 per ton for its single-stream recycling. Parcell said Truro pays to dispose of its recycling as well (neither Truro DPW Director Jarrod Cabral nor Eastham DPW Director John Roughley responded to requests for information about their programs for this story).

    Wellfleet has weathered those global developments better because it instead pays different amounts for different materials — and the more fully separated they are, the more valuable they are.

    Until July 2024, for example, the town was paying around $155 per ton to dispose of its mixture of plastic and metal recyclables, Cicale said. When the town started separating plastic and metal into two streams last summer, the department found savings: while they still pay a similar amount per ton to dispose of the plastic, they now receive about $225 per ton for the metal.

    Part of the reason for this is because it is much easier to clean multiple streams of recycling than one stream at the same time. And, Parcell said, smaller recyclable items often fail to get sorted out of single streams: “If something is smaller than a business card, it’s going to go through the trash.” Cicale said that’s one reason glass, which is often shattered, is challenging to separate effectively from a single stream.

    Prada said that despite the disadvantages to using a single-stream system Provincetown is unlikely to switch back to a multi-stream one. Sorting recycling curbside would be “a monumental task,” she said in an email, and “single stream makes curbside recycling easy on both the residents and the town.”

     

    Where It All Goes

    When Wellfleet ships out its recyclable materials, it goes to various places. Most of it goes to Miller Recycling in Mansfield, but Cicale keeps track of the commodities markets and will ship loads to different facilities if they’re offering better rates.

    The optical scanners used to sort recyclables don’t “see” black plastics as they move along conveyor belts, so those end up in the trash rather than getting recycled. (Photo courtesy Casella Waste Systems)

    From these places, the materials are sold to industries that will use them as raw materials. Parcell said that plastic recycling tends to be the least valuable, because the different types of plastic need to be further sorted. She also said that black plastics are not recyclable for the simple reason that the optical scanners used to sort items as they travel down conveyor belts that are also usually black don’t “see” the black plastic, so it doesn’t get diverted for recycling.

    The idea that plastic recycling is pointless is a myth, though, Parcell said. Once you narrow a stream down to recyclable plastics, she said, about 80 percent of the material is reused.

    BEHIND THE WHEEL

    The Dirty Work

    Do you know where your used motor oil goes?

    By

    There’s a dark side to this business — by which I mean there’s dirt and grime involved. Nothing nefarious, unless you are a do-it-yourselfer who doesn’t dispose of your oil properly.

    Maybe it’s nuts that I’m bringing this up. It’s one of those things nobody really wants to think about. But as long as we’re driving cars, we should. (And I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty hard not to be car-dependent out here.)

    The thing is, thinking about waste in this business opens up some possibilities for reducing it and protecting the environment as best we can.

    Taking steps in the right direction has become part of what I’ve had to learn as a working mechanic — they’re not practices that existed, for the most part, when I was in school. And they’re part of what you’re paying for when you take your car to a garage for service.

    I figure it’s kind of like what happens when you go to a restaurant. Part of what you’re paying for is not what’s on your plate. But you trust certain things will be done properly in the kitchen: you like to think they take care of the grease trap and recycle what can be recycled.

    If I remember to do it, I tell my summer customers that it’s worth asking your mechanic back home what kind of steps the garage takes to dispose of waste in the best way possible.

    Over time, dirt gets mixed in with your engine oil. After a while, it doesn’t perform well and has to be replaced. I hope do-it-yourselfers have learned not to dump this oil — it’s what they call “persistent,” that is, really slow to degrade. According to the EPA, used oil from one oil change can contaminate one million gallons of fresh water — a year’s supply for 50 people, they say. It should be taken to the transfer station for recycling.

    For a while now, we’ve been keeping the used oil we drain from cars on-site in a double-walled tank. We’re using an EPA-approved process for recycling it — and using it to heat the building in the winter.

    We buy clean motor oil in bulk so that we’re not back here cracking open hundreds of plastic bottles of motor oil that are probably not really recyclable. We have a cardboard recycling container. Anti-freeze that gets pumped out also gets recycled — a company comes to the shop and picks it up.

    Batteries, tires, brakes — all those things that get replaced in your cars — have to be properly disposed of, too. Essentially, that means being organized and paying up. We are registered to handle hazardous waste, and the state Dept. of Environmental Protection makes an estimate of what volume we produce and charges us accordingly.

    Having this on my mind is one reason I nag people to keep their cars in good condition. Your car is going to run cleaner and last longer that way.

    Have I gone soft? I don’t think so. I still do love internal combustion engines. I know that’s not going to change. But I will admit I did order myself a new bicycle earlier this summer. At least it has wheels, brakes, and gears. It hasn’t arrived yet, though. I hope it gets here before winter sets in. I will keep you posted.

    ENVIRONMENT

    Recycling Market Is Seeing a Comeback

    An update on compactors, contamination, and the cost of throwing things away

    By

    WELLFLEET — Of all the materials he handles daily at the Wellfleet Transfer Station, Renewliners are Michael Cicale’s biggest pet peeve.

    These insulated packaging materials “might be great for shipping, but at the end of the day, the municipalities have to handle it,” said Cicale, the station’s foreman, as he helped residents sort their recyclables in a row of 30-foot-long compactors.

    Supervising the sorting helps municipal transfer stations decrease contamination rates — the amount of improper materials in a recycling load. Less contamination makes recyclables more valuable.

    And the recycling market, after a 2018 crash when China stopped accepting recyclables, has been making a comeback over the past year, according to Kari Parcell, Barnstable County’s waste reduction coordinator.

    What there is to know about recycling, Cicale said, fits better in a book than a newspaper article.

    A paperback book; hardcovers can’t be recycled, Cicale said.

    Neither can a milk carton, he added, pulling one out of the mixed paper compactor. Even though the carton is printed with a recycle symbol, Cicale explained, the plastic interior prevents proper recycling at local material recovery facilities.

    Wellfleet Transfer Station Foreman Michael Cicale’s board of unrecyclables. (Photo by Thomas Lyons)

    “Is it technically recyclable?” he said. “Yes. Is it recyclable here in our normal municipal system? No.”

    When in doubt, Cicale said, diligent recyclers should turn to RecycleSmartMA.org, a Mass. Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) website launched in 2018 that includes a “recyclopedia.”

    Even with the website, “there’s no master list,” Parcell said. She recommends talking to staff at your local transfer station for the status of what’s recyclable.

    The Weight of It All

    Wellfleet’s compactors fill up once a month in the winter and once a week in the summer, Cicale estimated.

    Wellfleet collected 1,000 tons of trash and 488 tons of recycling in 2021.

    Provincetown collected 2,711 tons of trash and 1,157 tons of recycling during that same period. DPW Deputy Director Sherry Prada said Provincetown produced 45 percent more trash and 41 percent more recycling in 2021 than in 2020.

    Prada explained in an email that, in spite of the increase, the weight of the town’s waste is still only 62 percent of what it was in 2019. Prada guessed that reflects a decrease in business during the pandemic.

    In 2020, Eastham collected 3,596 tons of trash and 570 tons of recycling, plus an impressive 25 tons of mattresses, according to a DEP database. Truro collected 1,047 tons of trash and 469 tons of recycling that year.

    Unlike the other three towns, Wellfleet uses a “Pay As You Throw” program implemented in 2013. Designed to encourage recycling, reuse, and composting, the program has reduced the weight of Wellfleet’s trash by roughly 800 tons a year, Cicale said.

    That’s a good thing, because removing trash is expensive. In 2012, Wellfleet paid SEMASS $18.50 a ton to remove its trash, Cicale said. The town now pays $97 a ton to New Bedford Waste for trash removal.

    The Recycling Market

    Provincetown uses single-stream recycling — where plastics, metals, and mixed paper all go in one bin — and sells to Casella, a recycling vendor. The town pays the company $45 per ton of recycling, though Casella sorts the recycling and pays the town six to eight cents per ton of cardboard, Prada wrote.

    Single-stream recycling is convenient. But, said Cicale, “In a single-stream system, your contamination can be much higher, which means that less of your recycling might be actually recycled.”

    Wellfleet uses a dual-stream method, where plastics and metals are separated from mixed paper.  Cicale said Wellfleet’s contamination rate is under 10 percent, and the town actually receives payment for some of its recyclables. Wellfleet also gets a credit of $25 for each ton of mixed paper.

    Recycling isn’t always profitable, but “it’s beneficial,” Cicale said. “It’s also a state regulation. I can’t legally throw it in the trash, even if I wanted to.”

    China’s “National Sword Policy” limited recycling intake and crashed the market for recyclables in 2018. But national recycling prices began to rise in early 2021, according to the price tracking website Resource Recycling.

    Transfer stations typically have short “handshake agreement” contracts with vendors, which help them “follow the market,” according to Parcell.

    Parcell said that among the more profitable materials these days are scrap metals, corrugated cardboard, and newspapers, which seem to have intrinsic value even after they’re read.

    The glass market has only recently come back after a 2018 crash, when the one processing plant in the state, Strategic Materials Company (STM) in Franklin, closed, Parcell said. Their decreasing supply, driven in part by the beer industry’s switch from glass bottles to cans, could not meet demand, Parcell explained.

    The Wellfleet transfer station now pays a Dennis glass recycling plant $75 for each ton of glass, Cicale said. Through an aggregate program, if the Dennis plant cannot find a market for the glass, Wellfleet will receive in glass aggregate what they sent to Dennis as glass. The town can use this aggregate for pipe bedding in drainage projects, Cicale said.

    Of that Cape-based solution, Cicale noted, “It’s a rare and wonderful thing when you don’t have to move materials over the bridge.”

    RECYCLING, PART 1

    Plastics Prove Difficult to Recycle

    Their costs in the environment and in waste streams is rising

    By

    Recycle
    In an effort to keep people separated while recycling, Wellfleet went to single-stream recycling after Covid struck. (Photo Tessera Knowles-Thompson)

    Garbage. It’s a story ripe with complexity. The Independent is dumpster diving into the subject to better understand where the Outer Cape’s garbage goes. In this first installment, we look at plastics, especially what’s recycled and what’s not.

    You order take-out dinner from a favorite restaurant. The food arrives in aluminum to-go containers with plastic lids. As an all-around do-gooder, you’re relieved the container is aluminum, one of the more recyclable materials. You rinse the container and toss it in the recycling bin. But what about the plastic lid?

    You remember that Recycle Smart, an initiative of Mass. Dept. of Environmental Protection (D.E.P.) has a handy Recyclopedia. You type in “clear plastic take-out lid” and the answer is “You can recycle the whole thing!” Then, your partner points to the recycle triangle on the lid, which reads #6. Another quick search online tells you that polystyrene — a.k.a. #6 — is not recyclable in your community. In fact, polystyrene is banned from use in Provincetown restaurants.

    You toss the plastic lid in the trash and wonder whether recycling really works.

    Plastics Everywhere

    At town meetings this fall, Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Eastham (along with five other Cape Cod towns) adopted bylaws banning the sale of noncarbonated, nonflavored water in single-use plastic bottles under one gallon. These new bylaws join a growing list of other single-use plastic bans being adopted.

    But plastics are still everywhere — from the packaging on our online orders to our daily cups of hot coffee. This week, Science Advances reported that the U.S. produces more plastic waste per individual that any other country, and may also be the third largest contributor to marine plastic pollution.

    Over the past five years, the Center for Coastal Studies Marine Debris and Plastics Program collected over 48,252 pieces of debris — from balloons, to rope, to hunks of Styrofoam packaging — during beach clean-ups at Long Point and Herring Cove beaches in Provincetown.

    How much is getting recycled? Not a lot. It turns out that very few plastics are actually recyclable.

    The EPA estimates that in 2017 only 8.4 percent of all plastics were recycled. There are several reasons for that, said Kari Parcell, Barnstable County’s regional waste reduction coordinator. A lot, she said, “depends on where you live and what infrastructure is in place.”

    Recycling is handled differently in each town. Where it goes, how much it costs, and even which plastics are accepted vary by municipality.

    A Market Shift

    Provincetown, Truro, and, temporarily, due to Covid-19, Wellfleet, all have single-stream recycling programs, which means recyclable paper, cardboard, glass, metal cans, and plastic are comingled. They are transported to various Massachusetts-based materials recovery facilities (MRFs), where they are sorted, separated, and shipped in bales to various markets. This approach increases overall recycling.

    In Eastham (and pre-Covid, in Wellfleet), recycling is dual stream. These programs require residents to separate their materials on site. The recyclable materials are then sold to recyclers directly at a market rate. This approach is cheaper and introduces less contamination into the system.

    In both scenarios, the plastics are separated from our trash, which may reduce pollution. But the towns still must pay tipping fees to have the recycling removed.

    Up until two years ago, the majority of recycling from Eastern Massachusetts and nearly a third of recycling in the U.S. was exported to China. In 2018, the Chinese government announced a ban on imports containing more than 0.5 percent contaminants. According to Mass. DEP, the contamination rate at MRFs is about 15 percent. Suddenly, there were bales of recycling sitting at MRFs with nowhere to go.

    “The simplest message,” says Wellfleet Transfer Station Foreman Michael Cicale, in regard to recycling and solid waste, “is that your waste is a product now — someone has to want it.”

    Without the option of exporting to cheap international markets, the supply of recyclable materials is much higher than the demand. Since China’s ban went into effect, the cost per ton of recycling has more than doubled in most towns. Provincetown paid Casella Waste Systems $35 per ton of single-stream recyclables until June 2019; now, the town pays $100 to $125 per ton.

    Are We Wishcycling?

    Contamination is often the result of “wishcycling” — the act of tossing items into the recycling bin when they really can’t be recycled. Truro DPW Director Jarrod Cabral said the biggest contamination problem he sees is food scraps on plastic containers. “We would like to remind folks to clean their recycling,” he said.

    At the Wellfleet transfer station, white and blue plastic Amazon shipping envelopes are a common example of wishcycling, says Mike Cicale.

    Among other plastics that should not be included in your recycling: plastic bags of any kind, black plastic, plastic film or packaging, hot drink cups with plastic coating, plastic lids, straws, bulky rigid plastics, polystyrene or polyethylene foam (Styrofoam #6), containers with solid or liquid remnants, and anything smaller than a smart phone.

    As a guide for recyclability, the DEP’s Recycle Smart program and many MRFs go by size and shape rather than plastic resin number. All recycling programs in Massachusetts accept clean plastic bottles, jars, jugs, and tubs (most of which are PET #1, HDPE #2, or PP #5). Ninety to 95 percent of those are getting properly recycled, according to Edmund Coletta, a DEP spokesman.

    Forget about that tiny triangle symbol with a number inside, stamped on nearly all plastics. It is called the Resin Identification Code (RIC) and is a tool to identify the plastic polymer. The RIC is “a symbol that big industry petroleum/plastics started using to make people feel better about using their products,” said Parcell.

    A September NPR and PBS Frontline investigation found that the industry pushed for the symbols to appear on plastics — even if there was no way to economically recycle them.

    With limited markets and rising costs for recycling, calls for reducing use and outright bans are gaining traction.

    “Pretend we did recycle 100 percent of plastic,” said Laura Ludwig, the Marine Debris and Plastics Program coordinator at the Center for Coastal Studies. “What would that look like?” The quality of the plastic degrades after it is recycled, she explained, rendering it more likely to break down into micro-plastics.

    “Our focus,” said Ludwig, “should be on not making or using single-use plastics in the first place.”

    OUTER CAPE PORTRAIT

    Recycling Tales

    By

    LENNY FEDERICO / RECYCLER & TEACHER / WELLFLEET

    Lenny Federico has just returned to Wellfleet to begin his eighth summer on the job at the town’s recycling bins. Here’s Lenny in his own words, recorded last fall. The audio of the interview is posted on the Independent’s website.

    Recycling is big here in Wellfleet. A lot of people don’t understand how recycling works. So I feel my job is to show them what we do, and how we do it, and why we do it. I find that if I explain to people, “This is why we don’t want this, or we do want that, they’ll say, ‘Oh, OK!’ ”

    Now that I’ve been at the dump for seven summers, I have become an insane recycler myself. I look in the backs of people’s cars. “What are you going to do with that? You don’t want that, do you? Let’s throw that away for you. You don’t need that!” Other people will say, “That’s mine! Don’t worry about it.” They don’t want me to interfere with their lives.

    I think more than 50 percent of the people cooperate. Other people are in a hurry. They don’t really care. They just throw it in the machine. They hide things! One guy had a bucket full of what looked like cardboard, and he dumped it in there, and suddenly I heard, THUD! BANG! I looked in. He had thrown rocks into the cardboard container.

    People love to go to that swap shop. It’s open three days a week. And whenever it’s open, it’s always busy. It’s like the local watering hole. Do you remember Andy Griffith? They always hung out at the barbershop, Floyd’s, but none of them ever really needed a haircut. They just went there because all their buddies were there, and they could shoot the breeze and have coffee.

    The dump is a place like that. People meet there in the morning. One woman suggested just the other day that they have a coffee bar. That’s a nice idea, but I don’t think it’s going to fly!

    One time, the friends of the dump that run the swap shop wanted to have a picnic up there. And the town said, “No, you can’t eat at the dump!” Although I eat my lunch at the dump every single day.

    One of the best parts of being in Wellfleet is riding my red Vespa to work every morning. I go by the pier. I see the water in the jetty. There’s a few people out running with their dogs. I take my time. I see birds and geese and turtles crossing the road, and snakes and turkeys. It’s fun to see that early in the morning before most of Wellfleet is awake.

    I’ve been coming here my entire life. My parents started coming down here when I was a small boy. My father worked as a mailman. Everyone thought we were rich, because we had this house down the Cape. But we weren’t rich at all. We were just very lucky. Back in 1960, it was very cheap. Nobody wanted to come here.

    I could not imagine not being able to come to Wellfleet. If I were to move away, I would miss it too much. When I’m not working at the dump, I work with small special needs children, which requires an extraordinary amount of patience. Around February or March, when I’m in school, I start dreaming about Wellfleet and the transfer station and my summer job, and how I can’t wait to come down here and go bike riding and kayaking and working again at the dump.

    Listen to Lenny’s audio

    ­­­———

    Marnie Crawford Samuelson photographs and collaborates on short documentary films and books. She lives in Wellfleet and in Berkeley, Calif.

    TRANSFERENCE

    Wellfleet Inches Closer to Recycling Solution

    Each town’s transfer station setup affects ability to distance properly

    By

    WELLFLEET — When it comes to recycling, each Outer Cape town does it a bit differently. This has made the need to adapt systems in response to the coronavirus vary from town to town.

    While recycling has not been affected in a major way in Provincetown, Truro, or Eastham, Wellfleet residents have had to hold onto — or just throw away — their recycling since March 27.

    One reason Wellfleet is not accepting recycling is that the town has separate compactors for cardboard and mixed paper, plastic and tin, and rigid plastic, while glass and compost have separate bins. Sticking with this sort-separated approach has proved a good thing for the town — financially and environmentally — as the market for single-stream materials has shrunk in recent years. But the physical setup makes it difficult for people to move quickly in and out of the transfer station without congregating in high-traffic areas.

    A second issue in Wellfleet, according to foreman Mike Cicale, is that the town has four ground-level compactors that are relatively small. They have to run frequently, increasing wait times and congestion.

    “We’re looking at plans on how to delineate that space better with barricades and sawhorses,” Cicale said earlier this month.

    Eastham’s transfer station
    With its bigger hoppers and well-delineated setup, Eastham’s transfer station enables people to sort their recycling while maintaining proper physical distance. (Photo Silvio Genao)

    One reason Provincetown decided to continue curbside recycling pickup during the pandemic, said DPW Director Richard Waldo, is precisely because “we didn’t want people huddling around the hopper.” He said that, in determining recycling capacity, the size of the compactor is less important than the size of the hopper (which holds recycling before emptying it into the compactor) and trailer (which holds the compacted recycling). Waldo said that Provincetown has an 8-to-10-yard hopper and 100-yard trailer.

    While Eastham has similar sort-separated recycling facilities to Wellfleet, it has not had any problems with social distancing, according to DPW Director Silvio Genao, although he continues to monitor the situation.

    Cicale, who worked at the Eastham Transfer Station years ago, confirmed Waldo’s point, explaining why Eastham may have been able to maintain its recycling services: “They have essentially the same type of compactors we have,” he said, “but they have a large hopper on top so that they can handle a lot of material at once.”

    At the Truro Transfer Station, said DPW Director Jarrod Cabral, there are two single-stream recycling compactors accessible to both businesses and the public, one small (three-yard capacity) and one large (seven-yard capacity). Cabral said that he has not had any trouble with people congregating around the recycling station.

    Wellfleet may be close to a solution. Cicale said last week that the town was planning to switch temporarily to single-stream recycling, using all four compactors as well as two dumpsters. That way residents will be able to drop off their recycling quickly while maintaining social distance.

    Before the recycling area can reopen, however, Cicale said a few things need to happen, including signage and procuring more dumpsters.

    “Eventually, the rest of the station is going to open, so I don’t want to modify the structure so much that I back myself into a corner,” Cicale said. “We also have very little money to spend.” As of April 27, Cicale was unsure of the exact reopening date, but said he believed it would be within two weeks.

    Lydia Vivante, co-chair of the Wellfleet Recycling Committee, said that she understood the need to do single-stream under the circumstances, even though it is more wasteful. She nevertheless implored that Cicale consider reinstituting composting (a service that is also currently suspended), glass, and cardboard first, as they can be processed locally.

    In the meantime, she recommended that people compost at home, avoid plastic packaging, use cardboard for gardening, and reuse containers as much as possible.

    currents

    This Week in Wellfleet

    By

    Meetings Ahead

    From wellfleet-ma.gov/calendar, click on the meeting you’re interested in to open its agenda. That document will provide information about how to view and take part remotely.

    Thursday, April 23

    • Town Administrator Screening Committee, 2 p.m.
    • Local Housing Partnership, 4 p.m.

    Tuesday, April 28

    • Select Board with Emergency Management Team: COVID-19 Updates, 10 a.m.

    Thursday, April 30

    • Cape Cod Commission, Herring River Restoration Project Phase 1, 4:30 p.m.

    Conversation Starters

    Coronavirus Update

    As of April 21, Wellfleet had zero active cases of Covid-19, four cleared cases, and one death as a result of the coronavirus.

    Taxation Aid Fund Donation

    The Wellfleet Taxation Aid Fund Committee is asking the public to consider a donation to the fund when you submit your tax payment. The fund helps to pay the property taxes of low-income seniors and the disabled. To donate, write a separate check to the “Taxation Aid Fund” when you pay your taxes. These donations are tax-deductible.

    Social Distancing and Recycling

    The Department of Public Works is in the process of retrofitting the Wellfleet transfer station to accept recyclables in a hands-off way while respecting social distancing. DPW Director Mark Vincent said he hopes to open up the recycling area of the station within the week.

     Soup for Those in Need

    Chef Maryann Lucas of the Wellfleet Council on Aging’s Iris’s Café will be making soup to be packaged and delivered by volunteers on Friday, April 24 to people who could use the help, said Suzanne Grout Thomas, director of community services. —Devin Sean Martin

     

    Eight Solid Ideas for Reducing Waste

    Shifting the way we think about trash and recycling

    By

    Throughout Barnstable County, the Commonwealth, and the country, municipalities are struggling with the very real issue of too much trash with no place to put it, and the accompanying increase in handling costs. The Independent’s recent article on Provincetown’s town budget [Jan. 16, page 8] highlighted the fact that increased waste management costs are about equivalent to the overage in this year’s budget. While the select board grapples with the Herculean task of cutting costs, there are a few things we residents and even visitors can do to make a dent in the skyrocketing cost of handling our solid waste. Given that costs are tied to weight, here are some suggestions:

    • Buy less stuff. Period. The less stuff we have, the less there will be to throw “away” later.
    • When we do buy stuff, opt for the stuff with less packaging to throw “away.” Buy in bulk.
    • Does it still work? Is it in good condition? Try donating it to the swap shop, Ruthie’s, or the Provincetown Mall (Methodist Church Thrift Store), and give someone else a chance to enjoy or employ it.
    • Before clicking “check out” online, consider the packaging involved with that shipment, and whether the item can be purchased in person locally or even off Cape, with a little planning.
    • Take advantage of our transfer station’s acceptance of textiles, mattresses, metal, wood, electronics, light bulbs, packing peanuts, and corrugated cardboard — none of those items should ever be thrown “away.”
    • Compost all the organics. Even in our little hamlet with a rat problem, there are ways of composting household food scraps so as to remove 30 to 40 percent of the weight of our solid waste while not attracting varmints. Vermiculture is one way; a well-managed, contained backyard composter is another. Ask someone who is doing it already for advice.
    • Understand that recycling is a myth when it comes to most plastics, and any choice you can make that is not a single-use plastic item will ultimately reduce the waste load — especially since trash and recyclables now cost the same per ton for the town to handle.
    • Push for change. We consumers can only do so much with our individual choices. Ask your reps to support legislation that encourages Extended Producer Responsibility, where the manufacturer is required to take back and recycle or re-integrate the item at the end of its life.

    Provincetown already has a great track record in regulating our trash and recycling, probably because we are immersed in an environment adversely affected by pollution (the ocean). We led the Cape in banning plastic bags back in 2015, and we have since phased out plastic straws and #6 Polystyrene. The town collects and recycles cigarette butts in an effort to keep the streets and beaches clean. We install more free filtered water bottle-filling stations every year, and single-use plastic water bottles may be on their way out. Helium balloons have been banned since 1993! Making small shifts to our habits, and occasional big shifts to our way of thinking, will help the town reduce its costs for dealing with our waste.

    Bottom line: there is no “away.” Our convenient trash and recycling collection allows us to think we’ve done our part by lugging the stuff to the curb — but we can make the most difference long before that step.

    Laura Ludwig is coordinator of the Marine Debris & Plastics Program at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown.

     

    oysterfest 2019

    OysterFest Goes ‘Plastic Free’

    Beer and wine in cans and stainless steel mugs replace plastic cups

    By

    Wine can be canned. Truro Vineyards has done it with a rosé.

    WELLFLEET — Organizers of the Wellfeet OysterFest announced last week that this year’s event will be “plastic free” in response to rising concerns about the environmental impact of single-use plastics.

    Lead organizer Michele Insley said of SPAT (Wellfleet Shellfish Promotion and Tasting), the group that puts on the festival, “We’re a nonprofit that supports the shellfishing industry, and we want to create a festival where we have a great time but are also acting sustainably when it comes to our waste.”

    Changes at this year’s festival will include serving canned wine, beer, and water instead of beverages in plastic cups or bottles and requiring all vendors to use either compostable or reusable products for food service.

    Festival organizers have been working to reduce trash from the event since 2009, when SPAT partnered with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Wellfleet Wastewater Management Planning Committee to implement shell recycling, removing clam and oyster shells from the solid waste stream and returning the shells to Wellfleet Harbor as part of a habitat restoration effort.

    In the years since concern over single-use plastics has intensified locally. “The citizens of Wellfleet have had this desire on their own, organizing from the grassroots level to implement various single-use plastic bans,” said Insley. “We want to be in sync with our host community.”

    In recent years the festival has slowly chipped away at its plastic use, swapping plastic beads for wooden ones in the kids’ area, offering refillable water stations, and following the town’s lead on initiatives such as the single-use plastic bag ban and the polystyrene ban. Following a vote at Wellfleet’s 2019 spring town meeting to ban municipal purchase of plastic bottles, SPAT organizers began working to follow suit.

    “This year is going to be a big change,” Insley said. For the past decade recycling volunteers at the event have instructed the public on how to sort three waste streams — shells, trash, and recycling. “We’ve been trying to eliminate single-stream recycling because it’s hard to keep uncontaminated,” she added. “This year we’ll still have single stream on Main Street, but inside the festival we’re going to focus on trash, shells, and aluminum cans.”

    SPAT has partnered with Open Water, a Chicago-based company, to sell water in aluminum cans at cost to food vendors so they are able to offer water to patrons. In the beer tent Sam Adams will offer four canned beers and an oyster stout, brewed especially for the festival, which will be available for purchase in a reusable 16-ounce stainless steel cup. Truro Vineyards will offer kegged wines for purchase in nine-ounce reusable stainless steel cups as well as a canned rosé.

    “It can be hard to change packaging,” said Vineyard co-owner Kristen Roberts, “but we are constantly trying to decrease our carbon footprint, and we are thinking more and more about canned products as we move forward.”

    The lead recycling organizer for the festival, Christine Shreves of Wellfleet, said SPAT has partnered with the nonprofit Sustainable Practices of Brewster to sort through cans, and recycling stations will feature new containers with four-inch-square openings to prevent contamination. Sustainable Practices has been behind many of the municipal plastic bottle bans across the Cape and will receive a check from SPAT for the total redemption value of recycled cans.

    Changes to food vendor packaging are less clear-cut. The ultimate goal is to move to all compostable packaging and partner with a Truro farmer who is interested in taking the waste.

    “Unfortunately he still has some improvements to make in order to get licensed by the state,” said Shreves, adding that composting is “still the plan” long-term. In the meantime, the festival is requiring vendors to make the packaging switch to either reusable or compostable goods this year in an effort to be ready when a compost site does become available.

    “The most challenging thing [in working with vendors] is figuring out packaging for soups and hot drinks,” said Shreves. “The only options if you’re using paper are to have a liner of PLA [polylactic acid] or the plastic polyethelyne. PLA has been hard because while it’s not a petroleum product and it is made from plants, it breaks down only in industrial composting facilities.” For the time being these products will still be allowed for use by vendors.

    Some vendors will be skipping compostable utensils in favor of ordering reusable metal utensils, said Shreves, and will provide a bucket for customers to return used silverware. “I’d love to mimic festivals in Europe where when you enter you get a reusable plate, a cup, and utensils and bring them back when you leave,” she said, “It’s exciting to see vendors thinking like that.”

    © 2025 The Provincetown Independent, all rights reserved.

    terms of service