Duncan Watson explains the big lie from the plastics industry “is by default, that something should be recyclable because it’s got the chasing arrows on it.”
Keene: Duncan Watson is an expert on recycling and solid waste disposal and is the Assistant Director Public Works at the City of Keene where he has been for over 32 years. He had a brief time as a child voice actor where he brought Charlie Brown to life in several movies. He and I met over Zoom to talk about his book, Everyone’s Trash: One Man Against 1.6 Billion Pounds, published by Peter E. Randall Publishing, 2024. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
We started our conversation with a question about a Los Angeles Times headline, “LA County sues Pepsi and Coca-Cola over their role in ongoing plastic pollution crisis.” I asked him if he thought there was a crisis regarding soda bottles in landfills.
“If you sort of step back and take a bit of a larger view of it, there is absolutely a serious issue going on with regard to disposal. We don’t have a good infrastructure in this country in general to be able to make the quantum leap that’s necessary for us to do the right thing by the environment and, frankly, economically as well. We have a system that’s been used since time, in memoriam, of how to get rid of our waste, which is burying it in the ground by and large.”
“In Keene, the story I tell is we made one quantum leap back in the late 80s, early 90s, by making a commitment to close the landfill down and build this new facility that we had, and that got us from low single-digit recycling to where we are now, which is probably mid-20s recycling rate. Sitting here 32 years after I started, and that’s what I’ve got to show for it. We have the technology to do a lot better and that is investing in an infrastructure that currently doesn’t exist right now but can exist because the equipment and the resources are available today to be able to take this from the mid-20s to up to 80. There’s no understanding of this from the political bodies that there are alternatives. The plastics industry and what they’ve tried to sell us and what they’ve accomplished for us in terms of greenwashing have done a masterful job of manipulating the public into thinking that because they’ve attached that little recycling symbol to every single plastic container, it’s automatically recyclable. That is the big myth out there.
“We have to remember that there are some benefits to plastic in terms of looking at it from a holistic standpoint, plastics have reduced a lot of breakage and transportation. Plastics can preserve the product for a long period of time. The weight of plastic is considerably lighter than other alternatives for packaging, and so it reduces the greenhouse gas emissions from shipping. But that said, we need to do a lot better job of recycling plastic as a way of managing it. We live in a plastic world, even though plastics are way less than 10% of the waste stream.”
On being Charlie Brown:
Before we dived too deeply into recycling, I asked him to talk about being the voice of Charlie Brown. His IMDB.com profile credits him on Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown, Be My Valentine Charlie Brown, and You’re a Good Sport, Charlie Brown. Watson explained how he got involved with voice acting. He was chosen after a series of auditions. He and his family lived in Tiburon, California.
“I was heading back to class [from recess], and I noticed that outside of another classroom, there was a long line that had formed, but it was not my classroom. Well, that looks interesting. I’ll go stand in that line. I didn’t know what the line was for. I just stood there, very Charlie Brown kind of thing to do. And then I get to the front of the line, and now I have to do something. [He was asked] What character would you want to read for? And I’m like, Well, I don’t know what I’m here for. [They said] just read these lines. I read a couple of lines, and I didn’t even think anything of it. I went home and didn’t even tell my parents what had happened that day, other than how I had done in dodgeball, but I didn’t tell anybody about it because it just didn’t register. Two weeks later, my mom got a phone call from the producers. We liked your son’s voice test. We want to bring him in for another one. My mom said what are you even talking about? She had no idea. Eventually, she figured out that this was, in fact, a real thing. The voice testing went on for another two or three times after that. What they would do is take all the voice tests they did, and then they would sit around in a room and listen to them and then they would start eliminating, and I guess I got the last musical chair.”
What our waste of not recycling aluminum cans means:
Our conversation turned back to recycling, and I asked him about a line in the book that reports an astounding statistic. “The Aluminum Association estimates over a billion dollars of aluminum is thrown away every year. It represents enough aluminum to rebuild the entire US commercial air fleet every three months.”
“One of my absolute hugest bugaboos is aluminum, and when it doesn’t get recycled, it just drives me absolutely insane. That statistic I have glommed onto, it’s like filling up that aluminum can three-quarters full of gasoline and pouring that onto the ground, that’s the energy equivalent of what you’re wasting by not recycling that can. I look in trash cans everywhere I go, it’s almost guaranteed that I’m going to find aluminum cans in the trash. This is the most easily recyclable thing in the world, and yet it doesn’t make it into the recycling process. From a percentage-wise, aluminum recycling is a major success story. But in this particular case, think of the glass half empty, and how much of these resources we’re wasting.”
We talked about the confusion that surrounds the recycling symbol, and I asked, Should people concentrate on just glass and aluminum? Would that start solving one of the biggest problems?
Watson said, “I wish it were that simple, but it’s not. My answer is two parts. In the first part, we sort of have to live with the system we have right now, but we also need to have people starting to push back. We want to recycle more. We need people to say this is a priority. The way we handle our resources is not the highest and best use. It goes right back to that infrastructure idea. We don’t have the infrastructure to dramatically increase the amount of diversion that we’re doing. Even if I was to capture 100% of the aluminum and 100% of glass, those fragments of the waste stream are going to have a very minor difference in the overall waste stream that we’re trying to go after.”
The problem with landfills:
“In New Hampshire, we’re only aware of a lot of this stuff because of what’s been happening with the landfill that they’re trying to site up in the North Country. Casella Waste is trying to transition from its Bethlehem landfill to a landfill they want to build in Dalton. And, what’s causing the issues there is that it’s very near a body of water called Forest Lake, and there’s concern by the activists that even a modern design landfill with leachate collection doesn’t necessarily capture everything all the time, and so that the potential for contaminants like PFAs or volatile organic compounds leaching out of a landfill is a real concern. People are saying is this the best way to manage our waste? And then compounding that problem, both in the Bethlehem landfill currently, and in the Rochester New Hampshire landfill, owned by Waste Management, upwards of 50% of the waste that’s going into those landfills is coming from out of state, in part because Massachusetts has put a moratorium on any new landfill construction. They’re shutting everything down. Where is this stuff going to go? In some cases, some Massachusetts towns are putting this stuff into trucks and sending them to the Midwest or down south. I mean, the distances that some of this trash is traveling to get to the low tipping fee that that they can afford. It just boggles the mind; it makes no sense whatsoever. What is of bigger concern, a landfill can be considered to be a public benefit, as it were, because we do need landfills to a degree, but we rely on them way too heavily. The value of a landfill is the space that isn’t filled yet because that represents your economic potential down the road. If you’re filling up that landfill sooner than it would otherwise be filled up, then once it gets filled up you’re going to need to build another landfill. So preserving airspace is what can happen with more diversion and greater awareness of how waste is coming into these private facilities.”
“In a modern landfill, what they have done, and this is fairly recent, the 80s into the 90s when they started closing municipal landfills down, they used to just put dirt on it and cover it up and be good with it. Now there’s a whole engineering component that happens where they put a plastic liner on it because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to prevent the precipitation from getting into the landfill and mixing with the trash because what goes in eventually is going to come out one way or the other, particularly if you have no lining underneath your landfill. Most landfills that are closed that we’re operating in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and into the early 2000s, don’t have liners underneath. The landfills that we were talking about up in Bethlehem and Rochester both have liners that capture the leachate, but there’s also the potential that the liners can fail, and it causes issues. But in our case, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to prevent precipitation from coming in contact with the waste. A landfill is nothing but a biological reactor. The decomposition process requires both air and water to do its thing. And when you put a liner on top of it, the existing moisture that’s in a landfill will continue to do its stuff, and it percolates and generates gas. But eventually what happens is when the water gets cut off, the decomposition process starts to slow, and eventually it will stop and then it sits there as fossilized. You can dig into an old landfill and find stuff from 30 years ago that looked like it just was there yesterday.”
Describing how a transfer station works:
According to the NH Department of Environmental Services, there are over 200 transfer stations in New Hampshire, most of which are municipally owned and operated. Describe what a transfer station is and does.
“A transfer station, in its simplest form, is a consolidation point for waste that is going to be transported somewhere else. The whole idea is that we’re looking for efficiency and transportation. When a trash truck goes running around the city picking up waste curbside, it’s usually in a front load or a reload packer truck. The packer truck, once it’s full, goes up to the transfer station, and it disgorges somewhere between eight to 10 tons of material. The transfer stations, most of them are small, so they just put bags into a compactor, and then have that compactor hauled somewhere. In Keene, we have the waste trucks unload, and then we reload a 100-yard-open-top trailer full of the waste that’s just been deposited on our tipping floor. We can send somewhere between 24 and 26 tons versus having a ten-ton packer truck hauled off to Rochester, New Hampshire, which is 125 miles away. A tipping floor is just a concrete floor inside of a building. Then we use a bucket to pile that material and then we use an excavator to pick that material up and place it into the open-top trailer.”
The plastics industry has captured the use of acronyms along with our trash and I would like you to explain some of them. Let’s start with what an MRF is.
“An MRF is a materials recovery facility. A Materials Recovery Facility is a recycling center. Generally speaking, they are mechanized processing facilities. In Keene’s Materials Recovery Facility, the containers, whether they are glass, aluminum, or steel, are brought up, mixed, and then deposited into a large hopper. That material gets conveyed up that hopper and dropped onto a processing line and I have people and other equipment stationed along that line looking for the material that they’re responsible for. It’s a quality control step. We do it because we can’t always trust what people are putting into the recycling bin, and so we have to make sure that the quality is good, because we have to sell these commodities into the market, and people don’t want to buy things that they’re not asking for.”
“We have several conveyor belts at our facility. One of them is for bringing the commingled materials. And when I say commingled, this means mixing all the containers, and then we use that for the processing line. We have another conveyor that we use to feed our baler. What we do in our materials recovery facility is that we’re trying to pick out homogeneous materials as commodities, so that we can take those commodities and consolidate them for transportation. We’re just trying to make everything as efficient as we can. We refer to it as a negative sort system, so that along the conveyor belt, and those stations, the people are taking the material that drops onto the conveyor belt and putting it into the right container for further processing. After the humans have taken care of what they’re doing, then there’s a cross belt magnet that takes any ferrous metal off the line. The only two things left on the line at that point after the ferrous metal gets removed are aluminum cans or aluminum foil and trash. All that material drops onto another conveyor belt and at the end of that conveyor belt there’s an eddy current separator, [ECS]. It’s a rare earth magnet that temporarily magnetizes nonferrous metal and it repels it, so it makes it jump off the line. We have two containers stationed directly off of the end of the line. The first one, is the trash container because if it’s not aluminum, it will just simply drop straight off the conveyor belt. But if it is aluminum, it will leap off the conveyor into the container that’s just in front of it, and that’s how we capture aluminum. But before we had that, that was my job at the recycling center when we first opened up. I was at the aluminum can sorting station. And so I was doing this for hours at a time, [waving hands] sorting aluminum cans. When we finally bought that new machine, it took the place of a human and allowed me to do a bunch of other things.”
Do you make money on No. 1 and No. 2 plastics?
“They’re commodities, so sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. I’ve always told people that if I knew what the commodity prices were going to be on anything, I’d be a commodities broker, because there’s a lot more money in it, for sure. We don’t normally play the markets, per se, we don’t store stuff. That’s the big issue that we have with our commodities is the storage. If you’ve got a marketable load, that means you’ve got a tractor-trailer load of something and if you’ve got multiple materials that you’re trying to move out, you can’t have multiple tractor-trailer loads of stuff in storage waiting for the market to turn around. It just becomes unwieldy after a while. So we do the dollar cost averaging method of selling our materials and just count on when the markets are good, we’ll do okay. We always have a built-in amount of what recycling is worth because we’re not paying for the disposal of that material. So there’s a built-in avoided disposal cost is the base of why that’s a valuable commodity.”
The World Trade Center:
In the book, you talked about the World Trade Center, and you presented facts about the waste management problem that unfolded from it. Would you just talk about that?
“I was trying to make sense of it at the time, because, I mean, what had happened was just so monumental, and the scale of it, and the tragedy that was associated with it, I felt like I needed to do something to make it make sense to me in a way that I could approach it like here’s a problem that has to be solved. Terrorism aside, now you’re dealing with a waste issue that has to be dealt with. And what’s the scope and scale of it? I was fascinated by that, aside from the tragic aspects of it. And so what was interesting about the World Trade Center is, they had to reopen the Fresh Kills Landfill [in the borough of] Staten Island to get rid of the huge amount of waste that was generated from this horrific event. And so most of the World Trade Center and the effects are buried forever in Staten Island. It was equivalent to our landfill opened up in the 1950s and operated until 1999 and it has somewhere on the order of 850,000 to a million tons of waste buried in there, and that was in the range of the waste that was generated by the World Trade Center. I was trying to equate what a community of 24,000 people generated over decades to what happened in a single day just to try to give it some context for the scope and scale of it. There’s been an awful lot of people and first responders that were involved in the cleanup. They’ve gotten very ill from the aftermath of the clean-up efforts. It just compounds the tragedy.”
Burning trash in barrels:
You wrote in the book, “I have a study conducted by the American Chemical Society found a family of four burning trash in a barrel, in their backyard, can potentially put as much dioxins and furans into the air as a well-controlled municipal waste incentive incinerator serving 10s of 1000s of households.” Who’s burning trash?
“I’m a mountain biker, and I bike my area quite often. It’s unmistakable when somebody’s burning trash, and it happens all the time out in the rural areas where people just have a burn barrel. It’s what they’ve always done. And anything that has a BTU value, plastic being the primary means, plastic burns great when you’ve got a burn barrel going. The problem is that the emissions are completely and utterly uncontrolled, and they don’t realize the pollutants they’re emitting.”
Chasing arrows:
How do we deal with the lies the plastic industry presents?
“The lie is by default, that something should be recyclable because it’s got the chasing arrows on it, right? That’s problem number one. This is why I go back to that idea of the infrastructure. What limits plastic recycling, for instance, is the space considerations that I have. If I were to say, go after number three plastic, LDPE, low-density polyethylene, it would take me well over a year to generate enough plastic to possibly make a bale of this material. Just one bale. Every time we process anything at the recycling center, we always use the equivalent of what we call a Gaylord container. A Gaylord is a three-foot by three-foot by three-foot cardboard box. Some of them can be made of plastic these days. We need 40 of those things to make a bale. Because low-density polyethylene number three is an extremely specialized plastic. It just would take me forever to accumulate enough. So where am I going to store these 40 bins of material to make that one bale? And then I’m 24 bales short of a full load at that point, and I don’t have the luxury of affording that. That’s why the solution to this problem is the scale and the volume. If Keene becomes a transfer station, say, where the entire waste stream is collected and sent to these advanced processing facilities, then it’s perfectly feasible to take all these plastic grades and start to get after them, to pull them out of that waste stream, just like every other commodity that’s in the waste stream. That’s the problem for a town like Keene, we just don’t have the scale necessary to successfully divert that material and then market that material. That’s our problem. And that’s why I’m suggesting that the infrastructure is the solution to this because then those things can be economically diverted.”
Beverly Stoddart is an award-winning writer, author, and speaker. She is on the Board of Trustees of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project and serves on the board of the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism. She is the author of Stories from the Rolodex, mini-memoirs of journalists from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
