Bangor residents will no longer be able leave their recycling at the city’s public works garage starting Sept. 2. The city has kept that station open seven days a week. A variety of residents use it, including some who live in apartment complexes that do not have curbside waste collection and people who cannot fit all of their recycling into the loads that are picked up every other week.
Roughly 400 tons of recycling have been dropped off at that station annually, accounting for about half of the city’s overall recycling, according to Public Works Director Eric Willett. However, the city is closing the station Sept. 2 as part of a larger shift in how the city handles trash and recycling.
Bangor, like more than 100 other Maine communities, will soon take all that waste to a new facility in Hampden that’s been developed by the company Fiberight with technology that’s meant to boost recycling rates to at least 50 percent.
Besides closing the recycling station, the city is also ending its current program of having residents separate their recyclables from their trash and leave the recycling to be picked up from the curbside every other week. As of Sept. 2, the city will formally move over to a new arrangement in which residents will throw all of their recyclables in with their trash and leave the mixed waste to be picked up from the curbside every week, as now happens with trash.