Bar Harbor Holds Waste Audit
News
BAR HARBOR—Sorting through other people’s waste might not seem like a happy Monday morning, but you couldn’t tell that from volunteer and coordinator Jared Entwistle’s happy face as he stood with a clipboard, an orange vest, and a determined smile as he waved over vehicles heading down Ledgelawn Extension and towards the town’s transfer station on June 18.
“We’re here to help the town of Bar Harbor do a waste audit,” he said.
It was a line the dual master’s degree student from the University of Maine said repeatedly from just after 8 a.m., as he met stranger after stranger, but he didn’t seem to mind. The group’s goal, he said was to “come up with a better solution” for Bar Harbor’s waste reduction efforts. And the project itself spiraled out of another of Entwistle’s projects about reusable packaging.
Entwistle and a crew of volunteers from the town, University of Maine, College of the Atlantic, Jackson Laboratory, and Climate to Thrive would then take waste from the vehicles and sort it into categories. Their first goal was to collect 500 pounds from each of five categories: residential, restaurant, municipal, commercial, and weekly rentals.
In just three hours, they had hit that goal in all five categories, easily collecting 2,500 pounds of waste. He said they only solicited a couple of restaurants and hotels. The rest was the normal Monday morning waste in Bar Harbor.
“Bar Harbor is an interesting place,” he said, and that’s because the amount of waste expands and contracts with the tourist season.
Entwistle is working toward a dual master’s candidacy in business administration and ecological and environmental science. He had a waste audit pamphlet that he handed out to participants dropping off their trash, which read, “The Town of Bar Harbor is in the beginning stages of looking at ways we might reduce the amount of solid waste we generate. It might seem like a big task, but there are ideas and models of ways to get started. Our first step is to get a better understanding of the makeup of our waste.”
According to both Entwistle and the pamphlet, the hope is that by collecting concrete data about the waste generated in Bar Harbor (types, where produced, amount), it will help create “programs that help reduce waste generation and expenses associated with handling those waste materials.”
Bar Harbor’s 2022-23 budget allocated $614,000 for the disposal of approximately 10 million pounds of trash and recycling. However, that disposal depends partially on an unpredictable global recycling market. For environmentalists, another worry is that the waste stream (both waste disposal and recycling) creates a large amount of carbon emissions from the disposal, recycling, transportation and even the packaging and production of products.
The National Resources Council of Maine writes, “Plastic pollution is a major threat to our natural environment, climate, and public health. Plastic waste is littering our waters, forests, and open spaces, choking wildlife, and making its way into the food web. A growing body of scientific research shows that plastic breaks down into hard-to-detect micro-plastics, and the toxic chemicals used to make plastic have harmful human health impacts. To make matters worse, the production of plastic creates greenhouse gas emissions that are fueling the climate crisis.”
The results of the audit should be on the town’s website and discussion of it should be on the Bar Harbor Town Council’s future agenda.
According to a press release from the Jackson Laboratory that was written by Christi Jensen, the organization’s Bar Harbor campus held its own waste audit in June, and in six hours, a team sorted through the Jax waste, which totaled 4,226 pounds for the day’s worth of waste. It revealed that 82% was landfill material and 175 was cardboard for recycling. The press release goes on to say, “There was a surprising amount of film plastics (including trash bags, plastic wrap, and plastic sheets); this category weighed 600 pounds. (14%), equal to the weight of 4,286 large 50-gallon trash bags. Feed bags were also plentiful and made up 10%, or 439 pounds. of the audited material. The remaining categories—glass, metal, cardboard/paperboard, plastics, and paper—combined made up only 4% of the total. Compared to the 2021 JAX Waste Audit, we increased our total waste generation by about 11%. To put the numbers into perspective, in only two days, the amount of waste created by JAX would be equal to the weight of a medium-sized elephant.”
The lab is also working toward reducing its waste stream.
The College of the Atlantic has a Discarded Resource and Material Management Policy that students developed in the college’s the Zero Waste Club. The approved plan is working for a “90% diversion of discarded materials campus-wide by 2025.”
TO LEARN MORE
NATIONAL RESOURCES COUNCIL OF MAINE-PLASTIC POLLUTION
Read about the College of the Atlantic’s zero-waste efforts here.
Bar Harbor’s Solid Waste and Recycling Division is here.
For more information about the audit, you can contact Jared Entwistle.
Carrie, I am so glad you are doing this. I am enjoying reading Bar Harbor Story. Thanks!