Solid Waste Disposal and Recycling Costs

By Matt Riiska

One of the components of our budget is the operation of the landfill. Our current year’s landfill budget is $138,570. Part of this amount, $55,120, is for disposing of our municipal solid waste (MSW). Last fall, MIRA, the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority, the organization that handles our MSW and recyclables, experienced a major malfunction of one of their turbines that turn waste into energy. As a result, our current budget for handling MSW is going to go up.  

The simple explanation of the process is that MSW is hauled from Norfolk to the MIRA facility, where it is burned. The steam generated in this process runs the turbines that produce the electrical energy.

Last fall, one of the MIRA turbines was down for maintenance. This involves more than changing the oil in your car, since the turbines are completely taken apart so that new bearings can be installed and other necessary repairs completed. During Turbine #1’s downtime, Turbine #2 had a major problem that severely damaged the main bearings, main shaft and windings.  As you might imagine, this is very costly.

With both turbines down, trash collected from the municipalities had to be moved to other facilities for disposal. These other facilities were in New York and Pennsylvania. There was no disruption to collection, but there are costs associated with this.

Currently we pay $72 per ton for MIRA to process our MSW. On April 1, this fee will go up to $81.35 per ton and then go up again to $83 per ton in July. This will increase our budget for 2019/20 for MSW from $55,120 to $63,415, a 15.3 percent increase.

What can we do? The quick answer is to produce less trash. We can do this. When shopping, be aware of the packaging of products and recycle as much as you can. We all still get too much junk mail, buy items that are overpackaged and don’t take the time to recycle. 

I was asked a couple of months ago about recycling plastic bags and plastic film. We do. Next to the recycling bin there is a container for clean plastic bags. 

We currently use single-stream recycling, where we mix all of our recyclables together. Although this sounds good, it is not the most efficient way to do this. Recyclers do not like it, because it is costly; and there is too much mixing, so no matter how hard they try, the items never get completely separated, making them worth less. There are measures being considered that would have us go back to having bins for the individual materials—plastic, glass and metal—but this will take some time.

So for now, please watch what you toss in the dumpsters at the landfill and ask yourself if you are throwing something away that can be recycled.

For more information about MIRA, please go to their website, www.ctmira.org. For more information about the future of recycling in the state, you can go to the Connecticut DEEP website to 

learn more about the Connecticut Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) program: www.ct.gov/deep/cwp/view.asp?Q=590262&A=4918.