Some haulers caught mixing trash, recycling

On the day after Christmas, an investigator tailed a garbage truck on a shoreline residential route. From a distance, he photographed the truck driver emptying trash and recycling containers into the same load, bound for an incinerator.

On Friday, an investigator recorded video of another driver employed by the same hauler doing the same thing, then dumping a mixed load of trash and recyclables at a transfer station in Essex.

The surveillance photos were taken by one of four investigators employed by the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority, the quasi-public entity whose future is uncertain. Its officials described the surveillance but declined to identify the hauler.

If MIRA disappears, a likely consequence of the closure last year of the trash-to-energy plant in Hartford that was its primary responsibility, so might the only investigative unit exclusively focused on trash and recycling.

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, while committed to diverting far more waste from disposal to recycling, is not in the business of monitoring garbage trucks.

“That is definitely true,” said Jen Perry, chief of DEEP’s materials management and compliance assurance bureau. “That would be very resource-intensive, to have someone follow along behind the truck and look at every stop that they make.”

DEEP has five field staffers working on compliance with waste laws and regulations, as well as eight office-based enforcement personnel, Perry said.

“We have to sort of prioritize how we utilize our staff, recognizing that these are the same staff of a division that are charged with ensuring compliance with hazardous waste laws where we have a significant risk, potentially, to the public and the environment,” Perry said.

With a statewide bottledeposit system and singlestream recycling in every community, Connecticut recycles slightly more than half its trash, the fifth-best performance in the U.S. behind Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Oregon.

But officials at MIRA say DEEP needs to be more aggressive in regulating the flow of trash and recyclables to protect both the environment and the finances of a trash disposal infrastructure expected to only get more expensive.

In the trash business, tonnage is money.

MIRA no longer is paid to burn trash to generate power in Hartford, but it still acts as a middleman for client municipalities by contracting with haulers and recyclers and operating transfer stations in Essex and Torrington.

From Torrington, the trash is shipped to the Keystone landfill in Pennsylvania. From Essex, it goes to Preston, home of one of the four remaining waste-toenergy plants in Connecticut.

MIRA has put-or-pay contracts, meaning it is committed to delivering a certain tonnage or paying a penalty. In other words, MIRA has a financial incentive to know where the trash and recycling are going from its clients.

Depending on commodity markets that dictate the value of recycled plastic, paper and metals, it can be in MIRA’s financial interest to ensure that recyclables are recycled, not burned or buried.

Two years ago, for example, it paid only $3 a ton to get rid of recyclables at a materials recycling facility, or MRF, a tiny fraction of the $95 tipping fee at a burn plant or landfill. With a drop in market prices, the contracted MRF fee paid by MIRA is now north of $90.

Jennifer Heaton-Jones, the executive director the Housatonic Resource Recovery Authority, said the tip fees on recycling at times have exceeded the cost to dump municipal solid waste, or MSW, by $20 a ton in her area.

“I personally witnessed a hauler dumping his splitbody truck of recycling and MSW into the MSW pit” at a transfer station, she said. “Clearly he knowingly did that, but why? He did that because the market rate for recycling is so low.”

The hauler received a notice of violation from the transfer station and a letter from Housatonic warning that its registration could be suspended, HeatonJones said.

Will Healey, a spokesman for DEEP, said the agency does not routinely get notices of violations involving waste and recycling haulers.

Heaton-Jones, whose authority covers Danbury and 13 smaller communities in western Connecticut, said she believed such incidents were relatively