Where New Haven’s Recycling Goes

Truck 148, part of the New Haven Public Works program’s fleet of vehicles, rounded a corner in Newhallville on a spring Tuesday morning. 

As happens every weekday in one neighborhood or another in New Haven, the truck and its three-person crew served as the first link in the chain of a system that delivers New Haven’s recyclables from curbsides across the city, to New Haven’s transfer station on Middletown Avenue in Fair Haven, to facilities in Berlin and Willimantic, and beyond. 

The journey of those bottles, cans, and plastic containers away from New Haven has changed since the city’s recycling program started decades ago, and tells a small part of the larger story about global waste and how it is and isn’t managed. 

At the same time, it reflects questions people have had since the beginning — about what we can remake into other things, what we still have to throw away, and how we can do better at it.

The current upshot: Recycling in New Haven has improved a lot since it was considered broken in 2020, and the great majority of what gets collected curbside does indeed get reused. It’s worth it to recycle. New Haveners have gotten better at knowing what can and can’t be recycled, too.

But city residents are still trying to recycle things that can’t be recycled — and are throwing away a lot of things that could be recycled.

From Street To Street

New Haven’s public works department currently runs four recycling trucks a day, each with a three-person crew, covering the entire city in a week. 

The crews arrive at the transfer station at 4:30 a.m. and ride out on the trucks at 5 a.m. for a shift that lasts until 1 p.m.

The crews are doing more than just emptying the bins into the truck; the sorting, of what’s recyclable and what isn’t, begins at the curb.

In the past, residents needed to sort their recycling into paper, plastic, glass, and metal. Roughly 20 years ago, however, New Haven and other municipalities across the state switched to single-stream recycling, so all recycling ended up in one bin. This didn’t mean that recycling became less effective; it just meant that the sorting out of paper, metal, glass, and plastic happened elsewhere. As the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) found, the switch made hauling the materials cheaper, and — a big benefit — was easier for residents. But it also meant the sorting facilities needed an upgrade (more on this later), and an increased chance that the recycled materials were, well, dirtier, whether it meant a glass jar still full of food or non-recyclable plastic mixed in with recyclable plastic.

The work of sorting, however, begins right at the curb. The recycling crews on New Haven’s trucks don’t just blindly take everything. If they see something in the recycling bins that can’t be recycled, they don’t take it. 

“If we see a lot of plastic bags — black bags — or we start seeing bulky items in there, they’re not supposed to be recycled,” said Luis Sanchez, New Haven’s refuse superintendent, who works out of the transfer station. ​“Most of the time we leave it,” flagging it as subject for inspection. That first step is ​“how we try to lower the contamination rate” of the recycling stream, said Rose Richi, New Haven’s recycling educator.

The best way to use the recycling bin is simply to fill it with bottles, cans, metal, glass, and plastic containers, loose, without bagging any of it. Some people bag their recycling in clear plastic bags that they then put in the bin, which the crews collect if they see that the bags are filled with recyclable stuff. Sanchez emphasized that it’s better to not bag recycled materials because the plastic bags aren’t themselves recyclable, and have to be separated out before the materials in them can be recycled. That happens at the materials recovery facilities (MRFs, pronounced like ​“murfs”) in Berlin and Willimantic that have contracts with the city. It’s their first step when the recycling shipments from cities and towns arrive.

“Usually the company calls us,” Sanchez said, if they find too much nonrecyclable material for them to handle. ​“But lately we haven’t been hearing anything.” Sanchez hazarded a guess that possibly New Haven has been getting better at recycling. ​“It’s just certain areas that needs more improving.”

On the Tuesday run in Newhallville, the crew found some people still putting household trash in their recycling bins. ​“We would open it, and they would have recycling on top, and about 80 percent trash” below, said Demetrius Matos, who has worked for five years as a driver and crew member for the public works department. ​“You can’t take it because it contaminates the whole recycling.” Other bins had bulky pieces of styrofoam, which can’t be recycled. ​“Usually you see diapers,” Matos said; when he sees residents, he talks to them. ​“How are we going to recycle a diaper?” 

Fellow crew member Richard Pabon, who has worked at the public works department for 30 years, goes out, inspects, and deals with the bins the first crew has passed on. He has found books in the recycling bin, along with paper and magazines. ​“It gets heavy!” Pabon said, especially if the bins have a crack in the top and water gets in. ​“It’s like going to a gym. You’re picking up weights all day. Why do I have to pay $200, $300 to go to a gym?”

“You get a lot of clothes that get thrown in there” as well, Sanchez said, along with bulky plastic items, like dressers from IKEA. Those can’t be recycled because they’re too big for the truck’s compactor to break down. ​“You’d be surprised with some of the stuff we find in there,” he said.

If a person is found trying to recycle things they can’t, they may get a visit from Richi, the city’s recycling educator. ​“We go out an hour or two after the recycling guys go out,” she said, identifying houses or apartments by the untouched bins, because the crews ​“won’t pick up bins that are contaminated.”

“It starts with the ​‘uh-oh’ stickers,” Richi said, which she leaves on uncollected bins. At first, ​“for one route it could be anywhere from 45 to 60 houses that we’re stickering. When we go back the next week it’ll be less because people see the sticker and are doing better.”

Richi maps out where she hands out stickers ​“so we can figure out where we need to focus our education efforts,” but, she added, ​“we also kind of know.”

“At rental properties with quick turnover, that’s where we’re seeing the most issues,” Richi said. Those properties are clustered in the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday routes through Newhallville, Fair Haven, and the Hill. ​“We’ll go on the same street multiple weeks in a row, and everyone’s doing a good job,” and then ​“it’ll fall off again,” Richi said, probably because of ​“tenant turnover.”

If a follow-up visit reveals that a resident still isn’t complying, ​“I do another ​‘uh-oh’ sticker with a packet of information,” Richi said. If the problem persists, ​“I’ll leave a warning and try to talk to the homeowner or the tenants directly.”

Truly persistent nonrecyclers face having their recycling bin put on hold and getting a $250 citation. They can undo all of that by agreeing to participate in an education session, currently available in English and Spanish; Richi is also looking to get translations in Arabic and Pashto as well. ​“If they participate in the session and I feel like they understand what’s going on, they get their bin back and their citation waived,” Richi said. The goal isn’t to punish or collect revenue; it’s ​“just to get people to recycle better.”

On Lilac Street, as the crew stopped the truck in the middle of the block and gathered up several bins at once to feed into the truck, a woman ran out of her house with an armful of folded boxes to add to the haul, which the crew collected. The crew finished their route before noon.

“I love my job,” Pabon said, a sentiment Matos echoed. The crews meet families along their route, and ​“the kids come out with the parents,” Pabon said, or ​“they wave,” Matos said. ​“Every day is different.” One constant is the sense of making the city a cleaner place. ​“You’re coming in and you’re picking stuff up,” Matos said. ​“You’re helping out the city, making it look nice.”

To The Transfer Station

The route complete, Truck 148 arrived at the transfer station on Middletown Avenue.

It quickly deposited its compacted contents in a large metal bay just to the right of the transfer station’s weighing station.

Within a minute of Truck 148 leaving the bay, a loader at work there scooped up the material and dumped it in a trough in the back of the bay.

Those troughs emptied into open-topped trailers, positioned to be carted away to the MRFs in Berlin and Willimantic. New Haven uses two facilities because the flow in and out of the MRFs — which service multiple towns — can vary; sometimes one MRF is full and can’t receive any new material. 

“In this industry you need backup,” said Lori Vitagliano, executive director of New Haven’s Solid Waste and Recycling Authority, which oversees the transfer station. ​“It’s a way of ensuring that what you see picked up at the curb doesn’t get bottlenecked. It’s 50/50 each month,” she said of New Haven’s output to the two facilities, ​“just to keep the business of collecting moving.”

Leaving New Haven

The MRF in Willimantic is run by Casella, a company with dozens of waste management facilities ranging from Maine to Maryland, and is about an hour and 15 minutes away. The MRF in Berlin — Murphy Road Recycling, run by USA Waste and Recycling — is about a 40-minute trip from New Haven’s transfer station. Recycling has been happening at the site for a long time. Its first incarnation began operations in the 1970s, recycling fiber (that is, paper and cardboard). In 2007, it was converted into a single-stream recycling center, which meant it could then handle glass, metal, and plastic as well. Another series of overhauls in 2022 means the current facility is now state-of-the-art, with major upgrades to its fiber and glass processing equipment. 

New Haven sends between 3,000 and 4,000 tons of recyclable material to Murphy Road every year, and is one of over 80 towns that the MRF serves in western Massachusetts and Connecticut, along the I‑91 and I‑95 corridors. This means it processes over 200,000 tons of recycled material a year — the third-most of any MRF in North America in 2024 — at about 50 tons an hour.

“So what this facility will do is take your commingled recyclables” and ​“separate out, into 99 percent-plus purity, of cardboard, mixed paper, office paper, several different varieties of paper fiber” — that is, cardboard — ​“four or five types of plastic,” as well as ​“metals — steel cans, aluminum” and glass, said Chris Antonacci, counsel for USA Waste and Recycling.

That level of stream purity has not been easy to come by, and the story of the Murphy Road MRF is, broadly speaking, a snapshot of how recycling has improved since public programs were introduced in the 1980s. 

Jonathan Murray, director of operations at Murphy Road Recycling, has been in the field for decades. He recalled that when residents used to sort their own recyclable materials, requiring separate bins for paper and plastic, compliance was lower and hauling was more complicated. 

“You had to run two trucks, twice as many times” to bring material to the facility, he said. ​“We were an early adopter of single stream, believing that, with single stream, you get more recyclables in general” and ​“it’s more convenient for people.” It was also ​“less costly to the resident or town, because you’re running less trucks and less road miles, less labor.” It also brought a greater burden of sorting to the facility, but ​“we were convinced the technology for single stream would catch up.”

Globally, recycling has had a bumpy history. Typically, an MRF makes much of its revenue by selling its processed recycled material to other companies that want to use it, or failing that, to brokers who buy the material and turn around and sell it to someone else. For decades, a reliance on brokers has tended to create real opacity in the recycling trade. By selling to brokers, the MRFs largely don’t know where their recycled product is going, and the brokers can be quite unscrupulous about who they sell to and how pure they keep the materials.

The results of decades of such practices are discouraging. Starting in the 1990s and for much of the 2000s, as journalist Alexander Clapp details in a recent book, Waste Wars, ​“half the plastic deposited into recycling bins across the world went to China,” where its ​“fate tended to be unclear.” Pierre Barbour, then-executive director of the New Haven Solid Waste and Recycling Authority, said in 2020 that ​“90 percent of our stuff was going to China. They were taking all of our plastics, cardboard, paper, you name it. Anything that was coming out of your container here was going over there.”

In 2004 China received ​“4,000 cargo containers of plastic waste” a day from the United States. ​“By 2008, discarded plastic had surpassed airplane parts and electronics parts as the United States’ biggest dollar value export to China.” Some of it was recycled, but ​“anywhere from 2 to 40 percent of what had originally been sent from the United States” ended up dumped ​“in the Chinese countryside every year for 30 years.”

China imported all that plastic at first because its own ability to produce plastic wasn’t enough for its manufacturing requirements. In 2017, however, China’s ability to produce its own plastic meant it no longer needed to source it from abroad, and it banned importing plastic waste altogether. The ban sent a seismic shock through the global trade of recycling. It created ​“somewhat of a crisis in Connecticut. It’s not only statewide; it’s national,” Barbour said in 2020. Europe, according to Clapp, had been exporting 90 percent of its recycled plastic to China. A lot of waste has since ended up all over the global south, with Turkey as a major destination. The fallout from that — from blighted fields in Turkey to contaminated food in Indonesia to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is actually two enormous gyres of waste spinning in the Pacific Ocean — is well documented. 

Globally, the world has not figured out what to do with its waste, and it is generally true that rich countries in North America and Europe over the past few decades have found ways to dump their refuse in poorer countries, making the environmental damage they cause someone else’s problem. But as Martina Igini at Earth.org posited in 2022, ​“in the long run, China’s ban could have positive consequences for other nations. First and foremost, Western countries would finally be forced to find their own way to manage the garbage they generate instead of relying on the help of third countries, with experts predicting an overhaul of waste disposal systems.”

In many places, according to Clapp and others, that overhaul hasn’t happened. But according to the Murphy Road crew, it has happened in the Northeast. At Murphy Road, the change started almost immediately after China instituted its ban. ​“All of a sudden you got your biggest buyer coming out of market,” Antonacci said. From his perspective, it meant that the domestic market for recycled plastic would have to ​“get more resilient” and ​“stand on its own two feet again.”

In 2018, ​“we’re looking around the country,” and decided ​“to upgrade the whole team,” Antonacci said — ​“upgrade our single-stream recycling plan, serve some towns better, service our residential customers better.” It would require costs to rise. It would also likely result in a cleaner product. It was ​“one of those take-your-medicine moments, where the whole industry learned lessons, but I think we’re better off for it.”

They toured other recycling facilities around the country and ​“the world, really,” Antonacci said, and ended up partnering with Van Dyk Recycling Solutions in Norwalk to upgrade their equipment. The facility, which was named recycling facility of the year from the National Waste and Recycling Association, now uses a combination of machinery, manpower, and AI-enhanced optical sorters and ​“competes at the very highest levels of anything in the world,” Antonacci said. 

The first step in sorting the material is to take out the stuff that isn’t recyclable in the first place, starting with the single-use plastic bags some people bag their recycling in (a perennial problem), but running the gamut to garden hoses, the occasional deer or skunk carcass, and ​“the most dangerous,” Murray said, lithium ion batteries, which can catch fire in the machinery. ​“You name it, we’ve seen it,” Antonacci said. Depending on the municipality, about 15 to 25 percent of each shipment isn’t recyclable, and ​“the first thing we do” is take that out, to be sent to a landfill. The unsorted but largely recyclable material is first sent up a conveyor belt into the facility.

The interior of the MRF bears some resemblance to a mammoth Rube Goldberg machine, a multi-layered and multi-story maze of conveyor belts and sorting machines. But the process generally can be understood as subjecting the materials to increasing levels of scrutiny, sorting, first, recyclable from non-recyclables, but then, different weights of paper and cardboard from one another, different types of metal, different colors of glass, and different categories of plastic. This sorting is accomplished through a variety of means. Some machines sort glass from lighter materials through gravity. Paper and cardboard can be sorted by weight and size. In essence, it involves clever deployment of ​“eighth-grade physics,” Antonacci said.

The machines are calibrated to take advantage of the physical properties of the material. Cardboards can be sorted by size. Metals are sorted with ​“nothing fancier than a magnet,” Antonacci said. Electronic scanners can also spot differences. Finally, a crew of people are there at various points along the way to make those final judgment calls that ensure quality control; almost 100 people work at the plant in total.

By the time the material is halfway across the facility floor, the categories of recyclable products are visible; paper and cardboard are making their way across the upper levels of the machinery, while below, bins are filling steadily with different types of plastic.

Toward the end of the paper’s journey through the facility, it has been clearly sorted by type, with both workers and an AI-assisted scanner picking up the final scraps of material that doesn’t belong there.

Sorted paper and plastic end up in large balers.

Recycled glass ends up in a large pile of reusable shards.

The bales of recyclables are stacked by type near the machines, ready to be shipped out and reused. The floor pictured here is relatively full; at times, Murray said, it can be almost empty.

“It’s a commodity-based business,” Antonacci said, and given the high purity of the bales the Murphy Road facility produces, the result has been that the vast majority of the product stays in the United States — and that Murphy Road doesn’t really use brokers to clear its floor, selling directly to mills instead. Buyers sometimes seek them out and tour the facility. ​“Because we make a good product, a mill will take it direct,” Murray said. ​“The mills come looking for our products.” An MRF not knowing where its materials are going, environmentally, can be a red flag. The Murphy Road crew knows where its product is going.

So while the ever-growing piles of plastic spinning in the Pacific Ocean are a huge problem, ​“that is not New Haven’s plastic” now, Antonacci said. ​“The Northeast,” he continued, ​“has very developed recycling infrastructure.” Plastic that used to ​“go overseas” seven years ago now stays in the United States; ​“90-plus percent of our plastics are staying domestic,” going to recycling plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky, where it becomes a range of items from clothing to park benches. ​“A lot of our paper stays right here in Connecticut,” Murray said, with a bulk of it going to paper mills. Chinese firms have even built their own paper mills in the United States. Metal mostly goes to mills in the U.S. and Canada. Glass is staying local as well, some of it made into new glass, some into an ingredient in concrete. ​“Very few things are going overseas right now.”

In Murphy Road’s case, the improved environmental score also turns out to be good business. ​“The more you can keep it local, the better,” Antonacci said. ​“Costs go down because you’re not hauling it halfway across the country. You get more control, you get more transparency, better relationships. We’re a local company, founded in Connecticut 50 years ago, so we try to keep everything as local as possible.”

And while the costs of recycling have risen, it still costs less than processing trash. ​“It saves towns money. It’s resource conservation. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” Antonacci said. ​“It makes sense, economically and for the environment.” Vitagliano reported that it currently costs New Haven $119 per ton to process its trash, which goes to a waste-to-energy facility in Bridgeport. Recycling costs the city $99 per ton.

The state of the industry is also always changing. ​“We’ve been in the residential recycling business for 30 years and the material stream 30 years ago looks nothing like material streams today. Thirty years ago, it was a lot more newspaper, a whole lot less plastics,” Antonacci said. Amazon alone has changed the kind and size of cardboard the plant typically handles. ​“Things are changing. The consumer is changing. The economy’s changing.” With that change comes new versions of old problems, but also new ways to make things better.

The Age of Plastic

For New Haven residents, the good news is that it matters if you recycle — and the better residents are at recycling, the more stuff gets reused. This is especially true for paper, and cardboard, and extremely true of glass, and metal. It’s entirely worth it to rinse out your glass jars and bottles and metal cans, and put them in the blue bin.

Plastic is a more complex issue, and more in flux. As the MRF staff have noticed, the major change in recycled materials is that we use a lot more plastic than we used to, and plastic isn’t as reusable as other materials. Steel and aluminum can be completely reused — that is, melted down and reshaped — to an astonishing degree; as you read this, metal freighters are being scrapped on beaches in Turkey and South Asia (albeit through astonishingly hazardous work) and their steel is being made into I‑beams to build skyscrapers. 

Plastic is another story, because it’s difficult to turn one type of plastic into another, and it degrades over successive reuses. As The Economist recently reported, ​“No amount of washing, shredding, or melting will turn polystyrene (used for takeaway containers and packaging inserts) into PET (used for drinks bottles and some food trays),” and ​“no plastic can by recycled indefinitely. Each time it is broken down it loses some of its structural integrity. That means most do not become another version of the object they once were. Instead they are turned into something with lower-quality requirements — a drinks bottle becomes the filling used in jackets or carpets, for example. After two or three cycles, most plastic becomes so degraded that it is no good for anything.”

Companies are working on ways to improve plastic recycling, even as environmentalists call foul on those efforts. It’s possible that we’ll come up with a way to recycle plastic better; after all, there’s money to be made in finding a solution. But at the moment, for people interested in doing something about the growing amount of plastic all around us, one part of the equation is simply to buy less plastic, and especially single-use plastic. 

Avoiding plastic entirely is almost impossible in the modern U.S., as it’s an integral part of everything, from pens to phones to clothing to cars. Connecticut banned plastic shopping bags in 2021, but a lot of food and drinks still come in plastic packaging, as do things that come in the mail. Targeting the plastic associated with food leads immediately to some hard questions about meat and dairy. It’s one reason why vegans go vegan. For everyone else, buying meat and cheese without plastic packaging is about buying fresher — but also more expensive — products. But reducing our consumption of plastic helps.

More broadly, however, one major problem — which appears right at the curb in New Haven — is that many people are still throwing away things that could be recycled. ​“The amount of garbage being produced now, I would say maybe 50 to 60 percent of it could be recycled,” said Sanchez. A lot of paper, metal, glass, and plastic are still getting put in brown trash bins. If these things were in blue bins instead, they would be reused — the plastic at least a few times, the metal indefinitely. When the city’s compost program goes online, trash can be reduced even more.

For Sanchez and Richi, as well as the MRF crew, improving recycling starts with education — with people knowing, first of all, which bins are for trash (brown) and which are for recycling (blue). The recycling crews have noticed that longer-term residents of New Haven have figured it out, but in neighborhoods with higher turnovers of tenants, there are problems. ​“If we can get the landlords involved to teach their tenants how to do it properly, we can curb a lot of this stuff,” Sanchez said. ​“If they’re taught properly, they could do a lot more, and a better job.”

“I don’t think people are trying to do the wrong thing. I think they just don’t know,” Richi said. Matos allowed that maybe ​“some people know and don’t care,” but then ​“some people don’t know and they make a mistake.”

There are also solutions. The nonprofit RecycleCT has an app and website to answer questions about what can and can’t be recycled these days. Residents who don’t have a bin can call the Department of Public Works to obtain one.

Schools also have a role to play. ​“Start with the schools,” Sanchez said, teaching students how to recycle, ​“and they can take stuff home and talk to their parents.” Richi currently does school visits and tries to set up recycling programs there. ​“Only half of them are” recycling, she said. ​“We have to get DPW involved, and the custodians involved, and the schools educated — otherwise it doesn’t work.”

But for everyone along the line, from the truck crews to the workers at the MRF, the effort to help people recycle better is worth it. ​“If we could just get everyone to do everything correctly,” Sanchez said, ​“and get rid of the bags … I believe we can get this fixed. We can shrink the garbage down.”