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trash

    DUMPS

    Peak Trash Season Strains Outer Cape Transfer Stations

    Staffing shortages, equipment delays, and one experiment greet the season

    By

    August is peak trash season here, and the staff who run the Outer Cape’s transfer stations say there will be challenges in coping with volumes more than four times what they are in the winter.

    Containers at the Wellfleet transfer station where residents sort their recyclables — and now separate plastic and metal containers. (Photos by Kiran Johnson)

    Staffing shortages, outdated equipment, and even traffic are among the strains reported in Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet. The Independent was unable to get details from Eastham, despite repeated attempts to talk with the DPW director and staff there.

    In Truro, 65 percent of the entire year’s trash is collected in the summer. Last year there was an increase of nearly 300 percent from the slowest month, February (57 tons), to the busiest one, August (224 tons). Facing a recruitment crisis at the transfer station this year, the team was preparing to prioritize.

    “We have three empty positions this year,” said DPW Director Jarrod Cabral, who added that he had one staff member out with an injury. “For us to get around that, we are not open seven days a week.”

    Closing the transfer station to the public on Wednesdays and Thursdays means Cabral can deploy more resources to haul trash on those days. With an additional driver freed from attendant duties, two trash-filled trailers instead of just one can be dispatched to the Southeastern Mass. Resource Recovery Facility, a waste-to-energy plant known as SEMASS that burns the trash not far off Cape in Rochester. Summer traffic hikes the travel time from a minimum of four hours to as many as eight.

    Wellfleet’s transfer station foreman Mike Cicale tried to get ahead of the rush by hiring extra staff, but he had his normal two days a week off canceled for the summer anyway. He said his team, which last year dealt with 135 tons of trash in August, had been hit by the recent departure of several of the town’s harbor workers.

    “There’s only a few seasonal people left at the harbor, so we all had to go fill in,” he said, adding that residents and visitors should not notice the difference. “All operations are continuing as normal,” he said. “That’s thanks to the staff putting in extra effort and the public who have been willing to put things in the right places.”

    Cicale is talking about the fact that the town never adopted single-stream recycling, which turned out to be a good decision for ensuring that more trash is kept out of the solid waste stream. He’s also talking about this year’s effort to separate plastic and tins in a pilot that could improve efficiency further and save money.

    Inside a bin of cans for Wellfleet’s recycling pilot program.

    Signs at the transfer station in July explained that, while some places mix recycling together, “they spend much more money to do that” because vendors charge the town to separate them. “We were mixing tins and plastic based on an old dual-stream system from years and years ago,” Cicale said. “So, we started a program where we refurbished some tip carts that we had lying around and started diverting the tins into there.”

    The results of the pilot will be assessed in August, and the town will decide if the program is worth continuing.

    One thing it won’t help with is the proliferation of packaging that meld plastic and paper. Those cannot be recycled.

    “We’re always trying to catch up on the newest packaging that doesn’t work with our system,” said Cicale. “The recycling system works if you have packaging from 29 years ago.”

    Provincetown has one of the Cape’s busiest transfer stations year-round, with even its slowest month of February seeing 112 tons of waste dumped in 2023.

    Last August, that figure jumped more than 480 percent to 653 tons. As in Wellfleet, extra staff are hired for the season every year, but at the end of July, the Provincetown DPW was short on equipment to move the trash.

    “We are waiting for two new trailers to arrive,” said DPW Deputy Director Sherry Prada, referring to the 45-foot-long trucks used to move trash around. “During the busy season, trailers need to be swapped out more frequently, because they are quickly filled up with the town’s trash, so they can be transported and emptied, and then brought back to be used again.”

    Almost as soon as the calendar flips from August to September, the amount of trash drops significantly. In Provincetown it falls by nearly 75 tons in one month. That brings some seasonal relief, but the challenges and strains of the summer will only get recycled next year.

    DEBRIS BRIGADE

    Citizen Scientists and Artists Report In After 4-Day Trash Tally

    Yellow tubing is mystery newcomer to the trash heap

    By

    TRURO — After a four-day Outer Cape cleanup held in late September, the Marine Debris Team of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) took a deep dive into the 16 contractor bags and 12 piles of trash too large to be bagged, all of which had been collected from 28 miles of the back shore.

    The debris team has not yet learned the purpose or origins of yellow tubing that appeared in this year’s cleanup for the first time.

    Twenty volunteers spent four days at the Winkler Crane garage to sort and count 24,410 items weighing 1,950 pounds and including everything from derelict fishing gear to nacho chip bags.

    The debris was dumped out onto a large table and sorted into categories by the “debris brigade,” a group of citizen scientists and artists convened by Laura Ludwig, the Marine Debris Program manager at CCS.

    The inventory was conducted to assess the composition and sources of the debris — it is part of a long-term study by Ludwig’s team. Sorted items were counted, tallies entered on data sheets, and daily totals recorded. The count included items as small as produce stickers (a total of 39), Boston parking tickets (5), and syringes and their caps (265).

    The top 10 items (by count — not by weight: the weightiest item was fishing gear, 1,104 pounds of it) found over four days from Coast Guard Beach in Eastham to Race Point in Provincetown were:

    1. Bits of foam and plastic and items as small as produce labels got sorted into buckets during the inventory.

      Nondescript plastic film: 3,899 pieces (31 pounds)

    2. Nondescript rigid plastic: 3,505 pieces (18 pounds)
    3. Nondescript foam: 3,404 pieces (23 pounds)
    4. Food/candy wrappers: 1,702 wrappers (7 pounds)
    5. Bottle caps: 1,517 caps (18 pounds)
    6. Balloons and their strings: 902 (25 pounds)
    7. Straws or stirrers: 735 (1 pound)
    8. Rope less than 1 meter long: 588 pieces (combined with fishing gear, 1,104 pounds)
    9. Lobster claw bands: 578 bands (1 pound)
    10. Yellow mystery tubing: 551 pieces (1 pound)

    The purpose and origins of the yellow tubing is still a mystery, said Ludwig. This item has never appeared in Cape Cod cleanups until this year and has now been recorded in cleanups at many other Massachusetts sites as well, she added.

    Anyone with information about the mystery yellow tubing is invited to contact Ludwig at [email protected].

    ENVIRONMENT

    CCS Teams Scour Half a Ton of Trash From Back Shore

    An Outer Cape debris cleanup reveals a catalogue of what humans leave behind

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The first group of beach walkers departed Coast Guard Beach in Eastham bound for Lecount Hollow in Wellfleet on Friday, Sept. 24. Buckets in hand, they scanned the shore. They were not gathering shells or driftwood. Their finds were manmade and were destined to be carefully catalogued, like items in an archeological dig. They were collecting trash.

    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.

     

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