About a decade ago, Enfield-based USA Waste & Recycling passed on a chance to buy an industrial property next to its Berlin recycling plant.
The company saw no need for extra space at the time.
“We said 10 years ago: ‘What are we going to do with it?’” recalled Frank Antonacci, chief operating officer of USA Waste & Recycling, which provides waste and recycling services for residential and commercial customers in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
USA Waste’s Berlin facility is tightly packed onto a 6.6-acre lot on Christian Lane. Buying the extra real estate would have made it easier — and more cost-effective — to design a major expansion that was completed in 2022, Antonacci said.
It was a mistake the company didn’t want to make again.
So, USA Waste late last year spent $14.5 million buying three properties — one in Watertown and two in Hartford — from an entity working to dissolve the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA). The defunct quasi-public agency had provided single-stream recycling and trash disposal for Connecticut cities and towns.
There are no detailed plans yet for the sites. But they are in proximity, Antonacci said, to other USA Waste operations, and can easily serve short-term uses. They also offer space for future expansion, and can act as backup facilities.
“It’s an opportunity you just have to take a hard, long look at, even if we are still evaluating what’s the uses for us on these sites,” Antonacci said. “You only have so many opportunities to acquire these sites that are right in your footprint. So, I think for us, we wanted to take advantage of that situation.”
The new assets
The newly acquired properties include 171 and 211 Murphy Road in Hartford, adjacent sites with a combined 8.5 acres. The properties host a 92,616-square-foot industrial building that is fully equipped and permitted as a single- and dual-stream recycling facility; and a one-story, 19,200-square-foot industrial building.
Antonacci said the Hartford properties are nestled among existing USA Waste operations, including solid waste and recycling transfer stations and a rail station, as well as a compressed natural gas fueling facility used by the company and city of Hartford trucks.
One of the Hartford properties hosts a scale that served MIRA and USA Waste’s operations. The property lines and rights of way were somewhat jumbled, and USA Waste’s Hartford acquisitions eliminate the risk of interruption, Antonacci said.
“If we did not secure these properties, it would have disrupted our ongoing operations,” Antonacci said. “So, it’s going to allow us to continue to operate the way we have, and, I think, also appreciate some efficiencies.”
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The 9.8-acre site in Watertown hosts a 7,108-square-foot transfer station, three canopied trailer loading stations and a weighing station. It’s also near one of USA Waste’s garbage and recycling truck dispatch centers and depots in Watertown, and reasonably close to a transfer station in Waterbury.
At the very least, the Watertown purchase allows for redundancy if the existing Watertown or Waterbury facilities go offline due to an environmental hazard or extreme weather.
Antonacci said his company tries to create backup capacity for all its facilities, ensuring smooth operations. He also said the company is contemplating reviving the closed Trash Museum, which operated at 211 Murphy Road until 2016.
“We believe as a family, as a company, that education around recycling and sustainability and materials management is a really important piece of what we do,” Antonacci said. “We’re very proud of where the state of Connecticut is at already in those fields. We have a good story to tell, and I think reviving the trash museum of material rejected for recycling at the Berlin facility down to less than 5%. Nationally, about 25% to 35% of materials transported to a recycling center end up not being recycled, according to USA Waste.
In the Berlin plant, a maze of fast-moving conveyor belts moves through multiple levels of the facility, where metal, glass, cardboard, plastic, paper and other materials are sorted. The 2022 upgrade added optical sorting units, in which an artificial intelligence-enabled computer uses strategically timed air blasts to sort recyclables from one conveyor belt to another.
Manufactured using parts assembled in Germany, optical sorting units cost up to $1 million. The Berlin facility has 14 of them, three of which were added in 2024, Murray said.
HBJ PHOTO | MICHAEL PUFFER
Following significant upgrades and the addition of state-of-the art technology, including AI-enabled optical scanners that analyze the purity of materials sorted on conveyor belts, USA Waste’s Berlin recycling facility can now process about 800 to 1,000 tons daily, the company said.
Last fall, USA Waste added 15 AI-enabled optical scanners that analyze the purity of materials sorted on conveyor belts, working with United Kingdom-based manufacturer Greyparrot. Altogether, the units cost about $250,000 to install, Murray said.
Combined, the new technology helps USA Waste create and document purer bundles of cans, paper, cardboard and other materials, which fetch higher prices from commodity buyers, Murray said.
Several years ago, the Berlin plant added three automated fire suppression systems that use computers and thermal imaging to spot a fire before it breaks out, and can also spray a fire with targeted foam.
Those systems, which cost about $250,000 each, help the facility mitigate fire risks posed by lithium batteries that sometimes make their way into the waste stream.
New technology at the Berlin plant allows USA Waste to recycle materials that most others cannot, including the black plastics found in takeout containers and polypropylene No. 5, a durable plastic used for medicine bottles, bottle caps, yogurt tubs and more.
Murray, during a tour of the Berlin plant, said the extra space acquired by USA Waste in 2024 could help it continue to add modern and more efficient facilities.
“It will allow us to have more space for things like this in the future,” Murray said.