The Windham Solid Waste Management District – which includes eighteen Windham County towns – was established at its present 29-acre location in 1995 when it closed its landfill and became a recycling center. Eight years later, in 2003, Dick Petrie signed on to be one of the employees doing the work out in the yard and inside the covered M.R.F. (Materials Recovery Facility). He’s been there ever since. That’s 21 years when he’s been keeping 7 or 8 acres given over to recycling everything eighteen towns throw his way.
Some of these towns collect their own household rubbish weekly but those people who live close enough to Ferry Road in North Brattleboro can drive and drop off their recycling at 327 Ferry Road. Anita Grant manages the office along with Anita’s dog Coco, a softie of a black dog, who is the Official Door Greeter.; Vicki Hayes is all about finances and bookkeeping, and there’s Peter Gaskill, 1 ½ months into his role as Programs Coordinator. Skip Bonnett has been in the Scale House checking folks in and was a driver before that. But it’s Dick Petrie who is at the heart of the matter outside in the yard.
Dick was brought up in Guilford to be a doer. He attended BUHS and graduated in 1980 and started work in the area. But it wasn’t until he took the job offer from WSWMD in 2003 that he found his true calling - in recycling, in organizing.
Dick wants things in this facility to be just so: well-organized, efficient, and as tidy as can be. But that’s not easy when your work centers around other people’s trash and recycling.
“I do a lot of everything: I train the yard staff, the baler operators and the compost facility operators. Undercover in the MRF is a huge Cardboard Baler with 40 buttons on its control panel. The drivers unloaded truckloads of recyclable cardboard onto a roughly 40' long wide conveyor belt at just above floor height. That belt delivers a constant stream of recyclable cardboard up a ramp and into an 8’x5’x6’ compartment within this HUGE machine. A ram compresses the contents of the compartment and after several passes, the machine wraps wire in 5 places to create a compressed bale 3'x3'x5' bale weighing 1,200 pounds ready for recycling into new cardboard boxes. A driver from LaValley Trucking in New Hampshire drives this 42,000-pound load out of state to be turned into new cardboard boxes.
Outside this baling facility are the smaller-scale collection points on a roughly four-acre lot where members of the public, who have purchased an annual sticker, drop off their various recyclables. Dick and I pulled up to the designated spots for electronics, the food scrap dumpster (to be composted), and the redeemable bottles and cans area. Those redeamables go to Putney Road Redemption and are sold. The money goes to Project Feed The Thousands, The Brattleboro Rotary Club, The Boys and Girls Club, and the Windham Humane Society. Nonredeemable glass recycling is crushed and sold to commercial recyclers. Up the hill to the left of the scale house is where the trash goes. Box 1 is for construction and demolition materials, Box 2 is a compactor box for trash, Box 3 is for household trash and box 4 is for scrap metal – hauled away by their part-time driver, Kimberly Wilkins. Under cover, people are directed to throw electronics like stereos, radios, DVD players, stereos, radios, computers, TVs ….. into certain boxes, books to others, appliances to yet another spot.
He directs loading haulers who pick up various materials for recycling. He keeps his eye on every one of these sites from the cab of his truck or front loader throughout the day to make sure there’s room for more. He replaces full bins with empties. When he sees the tire area filling up, he calls to arrange for pickup of tires, books, paints and electronics....
The largest single area is a three-acre level field set aside for composting. Anyone with an access sticker or day pass can pull in to the scale house, pay a modest dump fee and dump compostable material like leaves or grass. Customers can purchase at a very fair price compost made on the site by Dick and Ted King, his helper, who would load it for you.
On the west side of this three-acre field are HUGE piles of leaves and grass. East of these are three piles of compost curing. Eash pile is 150' long, 20' wide and 12' high. Dick and Ted, on a backhoe, turn these piles regularly to control temperature buildup (and thus decomposition). This area is a magnet for Turkey Buzzards, Seagulls and Crows you can see from Putney Road or I-91. Even a young Bald Eagle with a 5' wingspan helped out last year.
So how does the recycling itself work? Construction demolition materials and household trash are unloaded by customers into roll-offs. They are then packed down by Dick, Ted or Tom and hauled away in 40 yard loads to a Casella depot in what used to be a TTT dumpsite on Vernon Road. a Appliances are emptied of freon and then recycled as scrap metal; tires are picked up by a private company. Recycled books get picked up by Roundabout Books by in Greenfield. All paint-related products are recycled by Clean Harbors. Scrap metal is trucked away to Scrap-It in Swanzey, NH. … And they’re seeing more and more license plates from new homeowners in our area. Cars pull in with license plates from Texas, California, New Jersey, New York and the other New England states – all with their WSWMD stickers on their windshields.
The one vast area that largely looks after itself is the 21 acre solar array that sits atop the closed landfill. It was installed in June, 2018 and includes 15,936 panels. Eighty-three investors include towns, schools, and non-profits in fourteen towns in Windham County. All receive monthly solar credits credited against their monthly electricity bills and thus enjoy significant energy cost savings for 20 years.
I told Bob Spencer, Executive Director of this whole operation, that one Claire Wilson, an elderly and conscientious Putney woman, told me I had to profile someone at WSWMD. She said “We are so lucky to have that service and those people right here in our community.” Bob responded saying “It’s the older people who are the most careful recyclers.”
This is one of a series of some 30 profiles of working people from southern Vermont and adjacent New Hampshire that I wrote and then published in the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper every Friday from Jan 1 - May 30. Do the same with your local newspaper.