One of the largest recycling facilities in the country, Casella Waste in Charlestown, is expressing enthusiasm about the wave of plastic bag bans sweeping through the region, including the ongoing deliberations in Chelsea regarding a potential prohibition.
Processing roughly 200,000 tons of recyclable materials annually, Casella operates the premier recycling plant in the Greater Boston area and ranks among the top five facilities nationwide. The company manages all recycling operations for Chelsea, though officials hope the City will adopt Boston’s approach by implementing a ban on plastic bags—referred to in the industry as Low Density Poly-Ethylene (LDPEs).
“By far, plastic bag getting into the facility are the number one contaminants in single-stream recycling,” explained Bob Cappadona of Casella. “By themselves, they are a very recyclable product. However, there just isn’t any market for the product. Second, with everything else, they get caught up in our machinery and cause us a lot of problems. If they come into our facility and get past our pre-sorters, they tend to get wrapped up in our disk screens and they wrap around them and cause stoppages.”
According to Cappadona, the problem emerges when bags become tangled in the disk screen machinery responsible for separating plastic jugs from paper and fiber materials. Removing them requires manual intervention: “There are so many that get in there that at lunch or at break time we have to keep two or three people there to clean the disk screens of plastic bags,” he noted. “Every three or four hours we have to go in and clean it up.”
Cappadona stressed that he does not oppose plastic bags as products, since they represent a viable recycled item when consumers properly return them to grocery stores as instructed.
The challenge arises because many residents dispose of bags in their recycling bins, often unaware of the restriction. To the untrained eye, these bags appear suitable for traditional curbside collection. Yet they remain one of the few plastic items explicitly excluded from recycling streams, despite regularly entering the system.
Russell Disposal collects all recyclables from Chelsea curbs and transports them to Casella’s facility on Rutherford Avenue, located behind Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown.
This is where complications begin.
“They are a good recycling product on their own, but when they get here with everything else, they are a contaminant,” he said.
Regarding Boston’s forthcoming ban, Cappadona indicated that Casella is not undertaking special preparations but welcomes the development. The company hopes similar measures will spread, ultimately improving the quality of their recycled material stream.
The Chelsea City Council has spent the past month examining a potential ban, holding two meetings on the subject thus far. While proponents cite litter reduction and environmental protection, local businesses worry about mounting expenses associated with switching to costlier alternative bag options.