Recycling in Limerick, Maine

This week a piece of mail arrived addressed to "Postal Patron." Normally, our being addressed as "postal patron" wouldn't appeal to us and the offending piece would quickly end up in the recycling bin. But not this time. The return address said, "Limerick Transfer Station & Recycling Facility, so we were intrigued enough to remove the staple from the folded sheets. 

Our dump is a one-stop facility for a lotta stuff. And I do mean Stuff. Besides the regular household recycling, there are sections for construction waste, appliances, used-up furniture, grass clippings and leaves (they compost this for residents to take home for their gardens) and rechargeable batteries and compact florescent lightbulbs. And, there's "The Take-It Shoppe." We love this- although we mostly drop things off (yeah, that funky plaid shirt that never got worn, and the funny-scented candle that wasn't allowed into the house), but we also found some nice glass vases that we used for the Francis Small flower arrangements. The shoppe serves a genuine purpose. 

One of the arrangements

We are very fortunate that our town dump has single sort recycling. No need to load half a dozen barrels into the pick-up truck for glass, cans, cardboard, paper, and plastic. Just one is all it takes, and unloading it is a quick tip of the barrel. Not that we have a lot of garbage- we don't and more about that later.

Anyway, the whole point of it is this. According to the “Postal Patron” letter, the recycling facility saved this little town $45,000 in 2010. Over 1000 tons of materials were recycled. Separating demolition debris saved tipping fees. The single sort recycling, started 2 years ago, resulted in 118 tons of voluntarily recycled materials. The Take It Shoppe reduces the quantity of materials that would otherwise be added to landfills. Thirty-eight tons of leaf and yard waste didn't go to the landfill. Without recycling, Limerick residents would have to deal with the cost of disposing of 275 additional tons of waste per year.

Now, that is respectable. The savings goes straight to our property tax bottom line. Our town's population has increased 29% in 10 years (including myself) and the fees for handling the town's waste have gone up. In spite of this, the cost of Limerick's trash removal for 2010 was $30,000 less than it cost in 2004.  Wow. 

Recycling is alive and well here in Limerick. Our Transfer Station motto is "Reduce, Reuse and Recycle". Since that fits right into our own homestead lifestyle, we'll soon be posting our own experience of reducing our consumption of energy and waste, reusing what we can and recycling what we don't reuse. -G.H.