Sam Gurwitt Photo
Most people hear transfer station and think “dump.” Joe Colello thinks: opportunity to be environmentally sustainable, and to earn Hamden some extra money.
Colello, who runs the town’s transfer station, drove throughout the site the other day in a white pickup describing in loving detail every pile, every machine, and every shipping container. The site contains all of the waste that residents can’t just throw into the plastic totes on curbsides: scrap metal, couches, chairs, batteries, leaves, wood, used motor oil, even paint.
To Colello, the piles are not just piles of waste to get rid of. The piles of leaves are black gold, the heap of aluminum is extra cash, and the pile of tires — well, at least it’s not in the waterways.
“I say yes to everything, because if it’s not there” said Colello, pointing to the neat diagonal rows of shipping containers, “’it’s going to be out there.” He pointed to the woods that form a natural border on the edge of the station.
In a busy month, said Colello, 2 – 3,000 cars come through the station. On a beautiful day, especially on the Saturdays when the station is open, cars line up all the way to the SCSU campus down the road. The station does not collect the waste that is hauled away in the totes that the town provides for regular trash and recycling pickup. American Waste takes that to other facilities for disposal. Everything else comes to the transfer station.
In his five years as superintendent of sanitation, waterways, and recycling, Colello has overseen a multitude of recycling and reuse programs as well as innovative site improvements.
Said Colello, “the Hamden Transfer Station lives by the three Rs: reclaim, repair, reuse.”
The transfer station always operates as a team. It’s not “I,” Colello said repeatedly, but “we.” “There’s not anything one person could do.”
Colello grew up in Hamden; in July he will have worked for the town for 26 years. He now lives on a farm in Wallingford, which he said he heats with geothermal energy, and where he powers electric fences with solar.
Into The Shipping Container
The transfer station is somewhat limited in what it can recycle because each type of waste requires a specific program. Some programs cost nothing, some make the town money, and some cost the town. Even the ones that require an expenditure, Colello argued, are worth it though because they protect the environment.
When drivers enter the site, they’re first met by a small scale house and the station’s offices, beyond which are rows of shipping containers, each with a yellow sign in front announcing its contents.
The first dumpster, a red one, is for metal. Across the side in white letters is the name of the company that buys the contents. Aluminum, said Colello, fetches the highest price. Copper is the most expensive metal that people would bring to the station, though few people bring it there because they know they could sell it themselves. Aluminum, therefore, brings in the most money.
After the metal dumpster come the cushions, couches, rugs, and other cloth furniture items. Next are four dumpsters for miscellaneous wood, plastic, and glass, which is taken to a burn plant.
Along the edges of the site are shipping containers for recycling TVs, refrigerators, tires, mattresses, old electronics, and other items. A company called Take 2 comes to take away the TVs, another company comes to take the refrigerators and remove the refrigerant, which is extremely harmful if released into the atmosphere. The tires that are stacked in another shipping container cost around $4 each to take, though the price varies. They then become tennis courts and sneaker soles. The mattresses in the shipping container nearby cost nothing to pick up unless there is overflow, in which case the town pays $20-$30 each.
One large shipping container holds the more sensitive recycling objects. A bucket on one end takes spent batteries. Next to that bucket are boxes for the compact fluorescent bulbs, which contain mercury. Next are used cans of paint, which Paintcare comes to pick up at no cost to the town.
People used to simply dump their extra paint into the storm drains, said Colello, meaning it would end up in the Long Island Sound.
A concrete tank under a low wooden roof holds the town’s spent motor oil. In the past it didn’t cost the town anything to empty the tank, but when oil prices dropped, said Colello, that changed. The town now has to pay a fee every time TradeBE comes to empty the tank. It costs around $3,000 each year.
Open space at the transfer station is also a means of earning some extra cash for the town. On top of the old landfill sit five acres of solar panels. True Green Capital operates the 3,872 panels, which generate 1.2 megawatts. They allow the town to save $30,000 on the bill from United Illuminating.
Black Gold
Beyond the neatly arranged containers, behind the old landfill that makes the centerpiece of the site, is where one major opportunity to earn money lies — black gold.
“We have resources to make money here, we just have to utilize them to the best of our ability,” said Colello.
On a large plateau on the northern edge of the landfill, the town’s leaves are laid out in neat rows. At one end, the rows are higher, the leaves and leaf bags just at the beginning of the decomposition process. The rows get progressively lower and more decomposed as they come closer to the large screener on the eastern side of the site.
As the leaves break down in their long rows, Colello and his crew run through them with a wildcat, which turns over the piles and aerates the leaves. As they get closer and closer to compost, they move the piles further east. The ideal temperature for decomposition, said Colello, is 140 degrees. Higher than that, and the organisms that break down the leaf matter die.
Once the piles are fully decomposed, a crew runs the compost through the screener, which sorts the debris — undecomposed wood chunks, bits of plastic — out of the precious “black gold” compost.
Last year, Colello sold $17,000 worth of its compost to Harvest New England. A normal annual compost product, said Colello, is 2,000 cubic yards. Most years are not as lucrative as last year. $2,000 to $5,000 is normal for compost sales. Yet last year’s $17,000 to Harvest New England, in addition to other sales, serves as a testament to the lucrative potential of the operation, said Colello.
Yet the compost operation depends on the screeners, which have given Colello and his crew trouble recently. The station has two — one large and one small. The larger one, said Colello, is old and breaks frequently. The town bought the smaller one for $100,000 a few years ago, but it’s not large enough to handle the quantity of leaves that Hamden’s trees produce.
Colello said he’s looking into buying a new screener, but it will cost between $300,000 and $400,000. A grant, he said, will have to come through to pay for it.
“We Recycle Our Own Roads”
The transfer station is literally made of recycled and reused materials.
Colello said he used to have problems with the heavy equipment making deep ruts on the flat where the leaves sit to compost. Then he saw an opportunity.
Whenever roads in Hamden are paved, the process produces grindings, or small pebbles of unused asphalt. He got the idea that those grindings could be just the thing he needed. He asked the paving crews to bring over a pile of them, and he and his crew spread them out to create platforms for the leaves. He said he no longer has problems with ruts.
The fire department also needs roads accessible for its trucks throughout the site in case it needs to get to a blaze. The grindings also provide the structure for those paths that weave between the leaf and brush piles.
Colello smiled as he gestured at the large pile of black grindings. “We recycle our own roads.”
The buildings too are recycled. The offices are housed in an old police substation that used to sit on Dixwell Avenue. The items waiting for pickup are housed in used shipping containers.
One of those containers has been fashioned into a small office so that a crew member can sit inside in bad weather and look out a small window punched through the side to see when people drive up.
According to Colello, the transfer station has not gotten new equipment since the 1990s. Rather, new heavy machinery goes to public works, and the old backhoes and bulldozers come to the transfer station. They often need repairs, but that doesn’t seem to phase Colello. “Clean it, fix it, reuse it, and be thankful for it.”
Outdoor Classroom
At the base of the hill that frames the transfer station to the East, about 50 feet from the greenhouse where the first buds of Hamden’s public gardens grow, a semi-circle of boulders forms a stage with the steep hillside as its backdrop.
A few years ago Colello and his team cleared out a marshy area where tires, trees, and other debris used to be dumped, turning it into a small retention pond.
Colello, who is married to Hamden Middle School teacher Kaye Colello, got an idea while clearing out the pond: What if he made an outdoor classroom? Perhaps classes could come to the transfer station and use the classroom for lessons on recycling, or on how food gets from the farm to the table. Classes have come a few times already, said Colello, and he hopes more will come in the future.
The boulders are now in place, and in the pond nearby, goldfish flit through the cattails. Colello made it clear that there’s no need to worry about them invading other water bodies. The pond is not connected to anything else.
There’s a small bridge over one end of the pond, and a short dock juts into the middle. Both, according to Colello, are made from wood salvaged from a fence at the Hamden Hills condos.
Colello said that every superintendent has tried to improve upon the work of the last, leaving a mark, quite literally, on the transfer station. He has tried to take the station further than his predecessor, he said, and he expects that whoever succeeds him will do the same.
He said he tries to pass along his passion to his workers, who then echo it back to him. With their ideas and his, the transfer station continues to grow and change. The key to the work: “You have to have the heart and care.”