Trash Talk

Vassalboro Transfer Station

‘Zero’ Sort Recycling and Trash Disposable

Sept 2026

What you should do when handling municipal solid waste (aka household trash).

Our trash is now being sent to the Hampden facility (Innovative Resource Recovery), coordinated by Municipal Wastehub (https://municipalwastehub.org), and processed before sending residual waste to a landfill. The goal is to minimize landfill waste and reuse/recycle as much as possible.  This goal is in everyone’s best interest:

Reducing waste put in our compactor, reduces our cost of transportation and disposal.

Reducing waste saves each of us money and the environment.

What Innovative/Wastehub do:

They receive our trash and separate out materials that can be re-used/recycled. For example, organic materials and paper can be used to generate biogas (and sold to Bangor), crushed glass used for fill, and some plastics and metals sold for recycling.

As other materials become commodities (i.e., a market for specific materials), the facility can separate and sell them. They have financial incentive to find markets for our waste.

What you should do:

Transporting our waste is a huge expense to the town. Reducing our waste lowers our transportation costs, and may bring some money to the town.

Please separate the following from the trash.

1.      Clean corrugated cardboard (Town Ordinance).

2.       All metals (we make money)

3.     Used motor oil and antifreeze

4.       Construction material

5.       Yard waste

6.       Electronics, lithium batteries, fluorescent/mercury bulbs

7.       Tires

8.       Clean/dry textiles (https://www.apparelimpact.com/)

All other household (municipal) solid waste can be bagged and placed in the compactor at the transfer station. You can save money on garbage bags by crushing non-corrugated cardboard and soft plastic bottles.

Let’s save money and help reduce our waste stream!  For the good of us all and our children.