Monkton Recycling Center by Erica S.

Most Saturday mornings, teenagers will wake up at around 11 or so and spend their day free of school. This is not the case for the Monkton Maples.
Every other Saturday, these teenagers spend three hours from 9 to 12 supervising and running the Monkton Recycling Center. The students are hard to miss with their brand new fabulous orange vests for easy identification. They help the townspeople with their recycling, making sure that not too many unwanted recycling items go in their two Cassella bins, corrugated cardboard separate.
Most of the time, the students don’t face any trouble with the townspeople who are polite and friendly with the volunteers. But there are few other times where there have been problems. “Sometimes, when you tell people not to recycle something, they do it anyway. Other times, they get hostile.” said one volunteer, “I don’t think they understand that we don’t get paid to spend our Saturday telling them what NOT to recycle.”

In the Bin
Monkton is a member of the Addison County Solid Waste District. Don Maglienti, the ADCWD spokesman says “Every town manages its own recycling, which is paid for either through that individual town's taxes, or at time of drop-off by that town's residents. As such, the Town of Monkton would need a special arrangement with Bristol (or with any other town) to accept recycling from [Monkton] residents, and Bristol would likely require some form of payment from Monkton. Bristol is not a member town in our District, either, but that isn't really relevant, since Monkton would have to work out a deal with any town, District member or not. The Solid Waste District doesn't get involved too much with individual town recycling arrangements, other than promoting recycling in general.”
One common phrase used at the center has been the motto for the Addison County Solid Waste Department’s policy on plastic. “No film, no foam” meaning, that plastic bags and styrofoam cannot be recycled. Although plastics numbered one through seven are now acceptable for recycling, just because it has a number on it, does not mean that it can be recycled.
Common mix-ups between the Chittenden Solid Waste District rules and the Addison’s are plenty cause for confusion. One incident at the recycling center involved the disposal of 5-gallon pails. At the Monkton Recycling Center, they are not acceptable in Addison, although they are listed on the CSWD sheet as being ok. Anywhere else that accommodates them asks that they should be pretty clean, however, and not full of paint residues or dried spackle, etc.
The Monkton center also asks that feed bags for animals not be thrown in the bins, as well as anything encrusted with food or dirt. The recycling should be clean, otherwise the town pays for it.

Where it Goes
The recycling that is put in the Monkton bins goes to the Chittenden Solid Waste District's Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). At MRF, large loads of recyclables are sorted and prepared for market. Recently, there has been a switch from separating bottles and cans from paper and plastic, to All-in-One recycling, and new equipment at MRF has also been accommodated for the switch. The new equipment mechanically separates bottles and cans from mixed paper. After the initial sort, workers manually separate the recyclables (except for glass, which is crushed to create aggregate for use in a variety of local civil engineering applications) into different material types that are then compacted into bales and shipped to market where they are made into recycled products.