Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship
MONTPELIER — Vermont produces a lot of waste. From food scraps to household chemicals, just about every piece of waste produced has a place to go and unique management needs.
Anne Bijur is the materials management supervisor for the Waste Management and Prevention Division at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.
Originally from Connecticut, she and her six-person team work to implement all the state solid waste related laws, such as the universal recycling law, the single use products law and the extended producer responsibility law.
Q. What are some of the goals you and your team have?
A. I like to think of our goals as three parts. We work to reduce the overall amount of waste that Vermonters generate, we try to reduce the toxicity of that waste and we try to increase the diversion of the waste.
Basically, trying to get whatever you put in the metaphorical trash bag out of it and put it to a higher and better use.
Q. Where does Vermont garbage end up generally?
A. Historically, most towns had what they called the town dump. But in the late ‘80s, there was a law that passed that said that all the landfills had to be sanitary landfills, which means they had to be highly engineered to protect groundwater and air quality.
So as a result of that, Vermont just has one landfill. It’s in Coventry, Vermont, and about 80% of Vermont’s waste goes there. The other 20% goes out of state, mainly to New Hampshire and New York.
Q. How did the floods of 2023 and 2024 affect waste management?
A. Lots of waste was generated. And in that sense, we were lucky that we have a landfill in the state that has capacity and could take waste.
One of the outcomes of the floods was that we realized that we needed to have municipalities be prepared for the next flood or disaster. Every five years, we have to write a new (Materials Management plan,) and we were in the process of writing it when the floods happened.
So our new plan has a section that wasn’t in the old one that requires municipalities to have a disaster debris plan. They have to have identified a place where they can bring any kind of hazardous waste that then can be picked up and disposed of properly, and to identify a place where vegetative debris that gets churned up can be brought.
Q. What else did Vermont learn from the floods about waste management?
A. Some of the transfer stations, which is where haulers will bring waste, were located along riverbanks. There was one in Montpelier that was pretty badly damaged, so one of the things we learned from that is when you’re siting a transfer station, it should be away from any flood plains or places that could be impacted.
Q. What do you think are the major future threats to Vermont solid waste management and what are proposed solutions?
A. I think there are several threats. One of them is the toxicity of products and trying to keep them out of the waste stream through programs like the Household Hazardous Waste Extended Producer Responsibility program.
From a social aspect, trying to get people aware of the fact that there are hazardous materials in their kitchens or garages, stuff that people think is normal but it’s really toxic.
Q. Outside of toxicity, what are other concerns regarding what enters landfills?
A. Another problem is the increasing frequency of batteries and battery-embedded products.
There’s little kids who want light-up sneakers, and there’s batteries in those. Vapes have batteries and they’re toxic. Even those singing greeting cards have batteries.
(Batteries) have to be disposed of responsibly, and Vermont has a great battery extended producer responsibility law. We have battery collections at all the transfer stations, at many hardware stores and many businesses that have collection boxes.
Batteries can create fires both in trash trucks and at transfer stations, especially lithium batteries. That’s a safety issue. Trying to make people aware that batteries are everywhere now and they can be a safety hazard and should be recycled responsibly is essential.
Q. What are other areas of waste management that you think are important for Vermont to focus on for the future?
A. Packaging. We don’t have a packaging extender producer responsibility law, but many states do. Those relate to how things are packaged. We want to figure out how to recycle packaging properly and encourage producers to design packaging that doesn’t use as many materials or that’s a smaller size.
Recycling depends on sorting materials into material types, and so if you have a milk carton that has lots of different material in it, that’s not just paper or wax. It’s really hard to recycle because you can’t take them apart easily into their different types.
The increased variety and complexity of packaging is difficult for waste professionals to figure out how to manage because they’re not easily recyclable. And our goal is always to try to keep things out of the landfill.
Q. Are there any concerns regarding Vermont’s capacity to handle waste?
A. We only have one landfill in Vermont. And right now, it has a capacity for about 20 more years.
We are having discussions with experts from around the region to talk about other ways that states like Connecticut, Maine and New Hampshire manage their waste and how we can learn from them. We’re looking at other solutions, which might be shipping waste by rail out of state.
Q. What programs are being put into place to reduce waste production?
A. We got some funding from the EPA to work on a Materials Management Institute for schools, focused on waste reduction, recycling and composting. We’re trying to educate kids, teachers and communities about waste reduction.
We also have a very small project called the ReVT Network, and it stands for reduce, reuse, repair. It’s open to anyone who’s interested in a different economy and is a good way to get involved and learn more about what’s going on in the reduction part of the waste management spectrum.