Connecticut has a trash problem. What is the state doing to fix it?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s John Moritz to discuss his article, “Lawmakers seek solutions as CT trash piles up,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short.
WSHU: Hello, John. You report that Connecticut is producing more trash than we can handle. How did we get here, considering that years ago, we set up these huge trash-to-energy plants, and I thought that would be the solution?
JM: Yeah, so you're right, and I actually spoke with one of the lawmakers, State Representative Mary Mushinsky of Wallingford, who was instrumental in setting up that network of waste-to-energy facilities back in the eight late 80s and early 90s. That network actually resulted in the landfills in Connecticut that had been permanently in place to accept, you know, municipal solid waste, which is just a fancy term for household trash, as a result of setting up those waste energy plants, all those landfills slowly started coming offline, to where we're at the point now, where the only landfills we have left in Connecticut are really accepting specialty bulk waste or other things that's not part of the typical municipal waste stream. So fast forward 20-30 years, some of these facilities have started to increasingly age. We're seeing them break down more often. They're costing more to run. And in 2022, the largest of these facilities, Hartford's Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority actually closed down, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of tons of trash that had been previously burned at that incinerator in the south meadows of Hartford having to be shipped out of state, and they're now going as far away as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
WSHU: It costs us a lot of money to ship all this trash across the country.
JM: Yeah. So that's one of the concerns that's been raised by both local leaders and state officials at the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, is that not only does it cost more to ship this trash long distances, either on tractor trailers or on rail cars, but once it gets to the landfill, we're not the only state exporting our trash. There's competition for a limited amount of space, and that's causing our tipping fees to go up.
WSHU: So, what are the solutions that lawmakers are considering?
JM: So two years ago, there was a big debate over basically how to put the funding mechanism in place to build a new facility that would take the place of the MIRA plant in Hartford. Now, there's been a lot of environmental objections to the idea of burning waste in Connecticut. Almost no one wants to see new landfills pop up. You know, those who have been around long enough might remember Mount Trashmore in Hartford, which you can still see from I -91 if you're driving up to Springfield, that's been capped. It's no longer accepting trash, but that's a legacy of when we used just to put our trash in landfills.
So in terms of actually finding a long-term solution, we haven't really gotten far. There was some bonding put in place two years ago in 2023, but it hasn't been taken out or utilized. So this year, they're taking a much more incremental approach, basically trying to find ways to fund diversion efforts and encourage people to take food scraps, things that can be composted, that don't need to be put into the solid waste stream. Take that out. Increase recycling rates, our recycling rates are in the 30s percentage-wise, and officials want to see that get up into this around 60%; we're not there yet. So, it's more focused on these diversion efforts at the moment than really finding a long-term solution.
WSHU: What are the incentives for people to change their habits?
JM: One of the biggest issues that officials face is not only trying to incentivize but to get these programs up and running. I live in New Haven; currently, unless I have a yard - which I don't - my options to compost are to drive to one of three or four bins set up around the city where they're accepting compost. And now that's a startup that just went online recently in New Haven. Other cities have no place where, if you don't have your own backyard to compost trash, there's really not a lot of options. So a lot of these programs are about getting the options there to people, creating a system where people can both separate their own trash at home and then have a place where it's either collected from their house like you would, you know, your typical trash, or a place where they can take it and have it be source separated for places that do have these options. A lot of it is focusing on education, setting up websites for people to be able to go and see, hey, what goes into compost, what doesn't, what's recyclable, what's not, what needs to be sent out with the regular household trash, and what can be separated.
WSHU: How about trying to limit the trash that comes into the system, things like dealing with single-use plastic and all that? There's legislation to deal with that, too.
JM: Yeah. So this is another effort that we've seen come back year after year the last couple of years, to ban the single-use polyurethane trays. We know it by the brand name Styrofoam, but that's something that's not really recyclable. It fills up the waste stream. Environmental advocates don't like it, and so there have been proposals to prohibit these types of items and force restaurants and other businesses to use more environmentally friendly paper and compostable materials instead of these single-use plastics. We've seen the restaurant industry lobby against this successfully in recent years, but lawmakers are back this spring with their latest proposal, which would put a prohibition in place beginning in 2026.
WSHU: I saw something interesting in your article about people being charged more for the amount of trash they put out.
JM: Yeah, so that's a proposal known as unit-based pricing or pay-as-you-throw. Basically, it does exactly what it sounds like. The more trash you produce, the more you pay to dispose of that trash. It's been a program that's been in place in some municipalities, most notably Stonington, that has used this system since the early 1990s. Though it's prompted, you know, pushback from other areas. I believe West Hartford looked at using such a system several years ago, but there was enough outcry from local residents that this was going to raise the cost of them throwing out their trash. And so, I believe that the municipality did not go ahead with that proposal. But that's one that DEEP is looking to fund pilot programs for. Basically, one of the bills that would be in place this year, if it gets out of the legislature, would impose fees on the trash that is shipped out of state, and the collection of those fees would go to fund pilot programs in various municipalities to try to find some innovative solutions to get ourselves out of this crisis.
WSHU: So the bottom line is that there's no big fix for a trash problem.
JM: Yeah, at the moment, the discussion is mostly around finding incremental solutions, and that kind of big be-all, end-all fix seems to be at least several years down the pipeline at the moment.
