BETHEL – Members of the Tri-Town Solid Waste Committee representing Bethel, Hanover and Newry last year approved a $165,880 transfer station upgrade.
It was designed to give residents of the three towns a cleaner, safer and more-convenient way to dispose of household trash and construction debris.
It also would have allowed the existing transfer station to be used for current demands plus 30 percent due to major residential subdivision developments either under way or looming in Bethel and Newry. Newry, said head Selectman Steve Wight, approved the upgrade, but Bethel voted it down.
Now, a revised, less-costly upgrade proposal is to go before voters this year, said Scott Hynek, a retired engineer who drafted the upgrades.
He wants the station to switch from using Dumpsters to a compactor system.
Bethel’s growth
Wight and Hynek said Friday that they hope Bethel voters approve it this time around, because of the continued growth in large, residential housing developments.
Newry doesn’t have curbside pickup of waste like Bethel does, Wight said. That means that all household trash and construction debris is sent to Bethel’s transfer station.
Hynek said that two-thirds of Bethel’s household waste is picked up by D & E Sanitation Service, a Bethel subsidiary of Pine Tree Waste Inc. of South Portland.
But, Hynek said, with 27 percent more houses coming to Bethel, that much more trash can be expected. That’s why the upgrade needs to happen, he said.
“Trash has got to increase in the future with all the new homes coming in,” Hynek said. “So it won’t take a whole lot more of additional stuff before the transfer station is demonstrably overloaded.”
Never on Sundays
On some days, like Sundays, he said, the transfer station’s capacity to accept domestic trash is at its max.
“If you want to use the transfer station, don’t show up on a Sunday afternoon, because they’re stretched to the limit,” Hynek said.
Other problems include rusted-out Dumpsters, Dumpsters with lids that don’t always close, and issues with birds, raccoons and bears getting into waste bins and strewing trash around the site.
Peter Mason, office manager for D & E Sanitation, disagrees with Wight and Hynek. He doesn’t believe that people building second homes in the new developments would take their trash to the transfer station.
The new homes are “definitely going to generate more garbage, but it’s just a question of how it gets handled,” Mason said.
He said that he believes that 99 percent of trash to be generated from these future second homes would be placed in Dumpsters provided by the developments’ associations.
“Most of the people coming up to these places are not going to go to the transfer station,” Mason said.
“A lot of them are not going to want to put garbage in their car and haul it to a transfer station when they can just put it in a nearby Dumpster,” he added.
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