I love my little town. Wendell, MA, founded in 1781, home to about 900 souls, was named for a Boston judge. We’re only 90 minutes from Boston, and 3 hours from NYC, but the clocks all stopped here in 1968. Or so it seems. Our town motto: “Just a stone’s throw from reality.”



And we recycle. Boy do we recycle. We have a Free Box next to the town library for cast off clothing and shoes so that our neighbors can stay warm on New England winter nights.  We have a Good Neighbors food program to keep each other well fed.  A community listserv to facilitate swaps and exchanges of labor. And we have WRATS.

No, that’s not a typo, and we are not overrun with rodents, although the local bears regularly raid our compost bins. W.R. A.T.S. is the Wendell Recycling and Transfer Station, where every Tuesday and Saturday, they open their gates to accept the recycling, giveaways, and landfill contributions of the good citizens of the town.

You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant, but you can leave anything you want at WRATS. First stop is the compactor, where the unusable, uncompostable, and unrecyclable go to be compressed and land filled. Pre-kids, my wife and I only left a bag here every other month. With twins, it’s now every other week. Still not bad, but we hate to throw anything “away” because we know there isn’t one.



Next stop is the office to see the guys who run the place and get some town news that’s usually recycled and embellished.



Then on to the Open Top for things like construction waste. I rarely leave anything, but sometimes I pick up some scrap lumber or a window for a tree house.



If I’ve got any e-waste I can’t find another use for, I can leave it here in the reused truck box on the right. It gets sent to a recycler who repairs it or reuses the materials.



Next, it’s over to the scrap metal area, where just about anything made of steel, iron, aluminum, copper or brass can be left for reclamation.



Then comes the heart of WRATS — the recycling barn. Note the skylights. Why use electricity when you can let perfectly good daylight through the roof?



Inside the barn, there’s a place for glass, cans, and aseptic containers like juice boxes. All self serve.



Paper and cardboard have their place…



Even egg cartons and paper bags get collected for reuse.



For bottles and cans with redemption value, or town collects them and the proceeds help fund the Good Neighbors program mentioned above.



And then there’s the Free Store for lightly used books, toys, and household items. As long as it’s still got life in it, you can leave it here, and chances are someone will take it home and use it again. With 8 year old twins- I get a good number of water glasses here, since we break so many, and the kids like to pick up a book or toy. Today I scored a rusty but serviceable bow saw to use at the sugar shack.



And for convenience, there’s a Salvation Army box, although we put most of our old clothes in the town Free Box. Note how SA has picked up on the recycling theme as well as the charity theme.



I’m not sure what kind of emergency they might have here. Maybe the beer bottles are getting drunk and smashing themselves against the wall, or the compactor is expanding? Maybe someone has a recycling emergency after a big party?

What can you recycle in your town? Here’s a sampling across the US and Canada.



NYC (that small berg to the south of Wendell) mandates recycling paper and cardboard, beverage cartons, bottles, cans, metal & foil, bulky metal and appliances with CFC gas and fall leaves. You can also recycle auto batteries and fluids, computers and electronics, fluorescent bulbs, furniture, household batteries, paint, plastic bags, propane tanks, fire extinguishers, and other pressurized gas cylinders, rechargeable batteries, syringes, lancets and other household medical waste, thermostats, thermometers, and other mercury containing devices, tires, and toner and ink cartridges.



Down south, Houston takes newspaper, magazines, telephone books, aluminum and tin cans, advertising mail, corrugated cardboard, plastic soft drink, milk and water containers, together in the same bin. Used oil is also collected and is placed next to the bin in clean containers with screw-on tops. The city also accepts yard trimmings, and through their “BOPA" program at the Consumer Recycling Center accepts "B"atteries, "O"il, "P"aint and "A"ntifreeze for recycling.



Up north in Toronto they have a very neat site index that covers everything on how and what to recycle. My favorite is wine bottles- they have a deposit, just like soft drink containers. They also have Recycling Magic, which shows what materials get recycled into — a great motivator.



And out in LA land, of course they have a feature film on recycling. They provide free bins to single and multifamily homes and  recycle all clean dry paper, cardboard boxes and chipboard ; aluminum, tin, steel metal, and bi-metal cans(it’s ok to be bi in LA), glass bottles and jars; all clean plastics — yes — plastic containers 1-7,all plastic bags and film bags, all polystyrene (aka Styrofoam®), and all miscellaneous plastics. Maybe LA’s reputation as a plastic environment isn’t so bad after all!



Back here in the Wendell woods, we still truck our resources to WRATS to live another day. What does your town recycle?