Elwyn Brewer remembers when he backed his truck up at the Hampden town dump and threw his trash over the muddy bank. The 70-year-old, who still serves as an on-call firefighter, prefers the town’s modern transfer station.

“The dump was terrible compared to the transfer station,” said Brewer, who has lived in Hampden most of his life. “It was an open dump with things blowing all over the place. We used to have fires out there and they were hard to control. The transfer station’s a lot cleaner and safer.”

Today, Brewer separates cans, glass and newspapers from his other trash for recycling and takes it all to the transfer station on Canaan Road. His efforts helped earn the municipality a 50.6 percent recycling rate last year, one of the highest in northern Maine, according to figures from the State Planning Office’s Department of Waste Reduction and Recycling.

Hampden does not offer curbside trash pickup, so about 50 percent of the town’s nearly 2,500 homeowners contract with private firms for trash removal. The rest use the transfer station, run by the town’s public works department. Nash said that as far as he knew none of the private disposal firms recycles trash for residents, but a few separate recyclables and bring them to the transfer station.

The Hampden facility is considered to be one of the best in the state, according to Hank Tyler, who compiles recycling and waste disposal figures for the State Planning Office.

The town established the transfer station and closed its municipal dump on Baker Road in 1974, when regional Sawyer Environmental Recovery Facility (now Pine Tree Landfill) opened, according to Greg Nash, Hampden’s director of public works. The town didn’t need two landfills.

An average of 750 vehicles go through the transfer facility weekly, he said. Hampden residents pay an annual fee of $5 per vehicle for a permit to use the facility, and can drop off everything except items designated as household hazardous waste, such as oil-based paint, motor oil, computers and batteries.

Under Nash’s tenure, the town increased its recycling rate more than 20 percent from 1999 to 2001.

“Three years ago, I found vendors who can recycle asphalt singles, sheetrock and wood,” said Nash. “The state figures everything in tonnage, and that stuff weighs a lot more than plastic bottles or those kinds of things. We still have to pay to get rid of it, but it costs a lot less to recycle them than it does to pay landfill fees because it’s considered to be demolition debris.”

Once recycled, the shingles are used for road patch, the sheetrock, which contains a high percentage of lime, is turned into fertilizer and the wood is made into wood chips.

In 2001, Hampden residents brought 4,006 tons of waste to the transfer station. The town sent 1,861 tons of that waste to the Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. in Orrington for incineration. A little more than 400 tons, or 10 percent of the total, went to Pine Tree Landfill.

Household recyclables, such as newspapers, plastics, cans and glass, totaled almost 186 tons of the 1,745 tons of material the town recycled last year. That figure includes appliances, metal, wood and demolition debris, which would have cost $100 per ton to dispose of in the landfill.

Hampden spent $283,293 in 2001 to operate its transfer station, according to Nash. Fees to PERC totaled $111,000, or $57 per ton, while income from recyclables was $4,500 and from permit fees $9,500.

Nash said that this year’s budget is the same.

He said that when the transfer station first opened, all household waste went into the trash packer and everything else, including all the items that now are recycled, went to the landfill. In the late 1970s, staff first set up areas where wood and metals could be separated out, then began recycling newspapers a few years later.

Today, in addition to the trash packer, there are carefully divided and labeled areas for newspapers, cardboard, brush, wood and lumber, concrete, rocks and porcelain, demolition debris, asphalt shingles and metal. The recycling area has bins for green, brown and clear glass, barrels for tin cans and a section to separate plastics.

It also has what Nash calls an “exchange area,” where residents can drop off books, magazines, clothes, toys, household appliances and tools that are free for others to take. During yard sale season, cars line up to drop off unsold items, he said.

“I got the idea about 10 years ago when I went on vacation on Cape Cod and visited a transfer station there,” said Nash. “We put one together here, but now it’s caught on around the country. I don’t know how successful it is at removing stuff from the waste stream. It kind of turns into a catchall, and a lot of it, especially clothing, winds up going to PERC, but people seem to like it.”