Bangor’s trash glut

From the outside, the PERC waste-to-energy plant in Orrington looks neat and orderly. This is where Bangor residents and 450,000 others in Maine and Massachusetts send their trash to be burned and made into electricity. A week ago, Peter Prata, PERC’s engaging and articulate head engineer, led the Bangor Recycling Committee on a tour.

It was a snapping-clear Maine day but as the small entrance door to the plant slammed shut behind us Maine vanished. We plunged into an unimagined, primal world. The stench was immediate, penetrating and nauseating. The thick, pungent odor entered not just by the nostrils, but through the skin and the eyes, a smell that banished forever the concept that scents could be pleasurable. It was all pervasive, three dimensional, stretching away into the distance.

A dusky half light filtered through distant dirty windows, illuminating a scene from the industrial revolution gone amok. All was crusted with spider webs of hanging dirt, tinsels of decay powdered with grime and filth. The noise – a desperate cacophony of iron striking on iron, the groaning of an endless unhappiness of rejected worldly goods – accompanied us as we moved forward.

This wasn’t garbage. The term is too prosaic. We were surrounded by the litter of our civilization, our collapsed world. We looked out over a vast indoor sea of refuse – paper shreds, plastic of every description, tires, mattresses, a Red Sox baseball cap. In the distance, small trucks – in reality 18-wheelers with 22 tons of refuse aboard – vomited out their contents to be picked over by large front-end loaders. Shredded morsels were fed into furnaces to run a large generator, with the tailings spit out into piles of rubble.

At that moment I saw the very special hell created by our consumer society. Where do the neatly tied bags of garbage go after the trash men come? Where does that old radio that costs more to fix than a new one end up? Here were the bows and ribbons, the glossy magazines, the fancy packaging that beautifies our world. Dante’s nine circles of hell depend on the primal fears of our imagination; this reality was more profoundly disturbing.

What was equally sobering was that – to paraphrase Pogo – I met the enemy, and the enemy was me. The packages I buy, the junk mail I throw out, almost everything that exits my house was here staring at me. How could I live so obliviously in the bright outside world, not seeing the trail of my material possessions that lead so directly here?

So, what can we do? Prata is not optimistic. Recycle, to be sure. But recycling isn’t really a complete answer. Bangor just breaks even on its recycling program, and the city currently doesn’t have the money to make it more comprehensive. For all too many materials, there isn’t a market.

Prata has disturbing stories of Pennsylvania incinerators burning No. 2 plastic milk bottles from the Midwest late at night. A double waste. He thinks we have trash and recycling backward. Money should go to universities and industry to discover innovative ways to reutilize our goods before they enter the refuse stream.

Prata reasons there must be a better use for old plastic than park benches. Our legislators need to hear from us; waste reutilization and reduction must be a priority.

But closer to home and better yet, shop wisely. Don’t buy wastefully. The pathway from “Stuff ‘R Us” leads directly to PERC. On my way home, the checkout clerk at my Bangor market started to put my few purchases in a plastic bag. I couldn’t bear it; grimy plastic bags on their way to the furnace danced airily before me. I told her my story. She brought out a paper bag. That too seemed sad. I put my items in my overturned hat and took them home.

Geoff Gratwick is a Bangor city councilor.