HALLOWELL — North Bay Recycling Center, the city’s lone recycling center in the city-owned public works building, will now open only three hours a week on Saturdays to stem chronic misuse that renders recyclables unusable.

From 9 a.m. to noon, two monitors will be stationed outside to ensure patrons only dispose of recyclable materials at the center.

Misuse of recycling services is an issue not just in Hallowell and across central Maine, but across the country. Environmental Protection Agency data shows only about a quarter of all solid waste is recycled across the United States, largely because many people don’t know what can be recycled.

Almost 80% of recyclable materials end up in landfills, according to a 2024 report from the nonprofit Recycling Partnership. Most of those recyclables are shifted out of the recycling pipeline at home — think recyclables thrown in the trash or trash thrown in the recycling, contaminating the entire batch.

North Bay is operated by Hallowell’s public works department — which is housed in the same building at 286 Water St. — and has been open for nearly 60 hours per week for years. The change cuts North Bay’s hours by 95%.

Over the past several years, Hallowell Public Works Director Tom Goraj said North Bay has increasingly become a dumping ground for nonrecyclables, including plastic foam products such as Styrofoam, furniture and appliances. Public works employees are then responsible for clearing out the space and disposing of trash properly, which Goraj said can sometimes mean waiting for annual bulk waste pickup.

In a March 15 Facebook post, photos from Hallowell resident Marty Thornton showed North Bay in disarray. Plastic panels, a door frame and a PVC pipe had been piled into a corner just below signs that read “NO HARD PLASTICS” and “NO BULKY ITEMS.”

Another photo showed three TVs beside a pile of nonrecyclable plastics. Goraj said a crib and several car seats have also been discarded at North Bay.

“The one thing that really irritated me — one time there was one of those big metal donation boxes for clothes, and there was household trash in it,” Goraj said. “That was kind of the breaking point right there.”

Hallowell’s Facebook reposted Thornton’s photos, saying the treatment of the center was “not acceptable.” Local recycling advocates began to brainstorm solutions.

Hallowell residents Karen Simpson and Sylvie Charron visited North Bay to relabel bins and boxes, hoping to help solve the facility’s misuse. There, Simpson and Charron got to talking with public works employees.

“One of them said, ‘You know, Pittston doesn’t have this problem at all. They have a monitor that checks to make sure people are putting things in the right bins, and they’re only open for limited hours,'” Simpson said. “This wasn’t what we were expecting to happen when we went down to redo the signs, but we drove over to Pittston, and that’s exactly what happens.”

Jane Hubert, a former select board member and chairwoman who has been active in Pittston’s recycling advocacy group for two decades, said the monitors have been especially effective in keeping nonrecyclables out of the town’s recycling facility, which is really just a few large metal containers beside the town office on Whitefield Road. The locked containers were bought using grant funding about 20 years ago.

Volunteers staff the area twice a week during the summer — on Wednesdays from 4:30–7:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. — and on Saturdays from September to May.

The town first recruited those monitors about 10 years ago, and Hubert said they have been crucial to improving the effectiveness of the town’s recycling operation since.

“There’s always someone who’s, ‘Oh, I can take care of this myself,'” Hubert said. “We only recycle No. 2 plastic, so they’re throwing in 5s and they’re throwing in 1s, going, ‘I can take care of plastics.’ But they really need to be monitored.”

Hubert said many residents simply don’t know what is recyclable at the station and what isn’t. No. 2 plastics, the kind Pittston accepts, generally include sturdy bottles for household items, flexible pipes, toys, milk jugs and other crushable plastics. These products can be safely recycled up to 10 times.

Other kinds, though, like PVC plastic and foam products like Styrofoam, can be difficult — and, in some cases, dangerous — to recycle. Both have been commonly dumped at North Bay, Simpson said.

“And since North Bay was open every single day of the week, pretty much all day long, and it’s on a well-used route between Augusta and Gardiner, a lot of stuff is being dumped, and it was making a lot more work for public works because they’ve got to clean it up and take it away,” Simpson said.

Simpson said she’s hopeful the new hours and monitors will reduce the amount of trash discarded in North Bay, just like in Pittston — or, at the very least, she said she hopes to answer some questions about what is and isn’t recyclable.

“We’re just going to start on Saturday for three hours and see what happens,” she said. “I don’t think it’s feasible to keep it open all the time and continue with what we’re doing, but hopefully if there are monitors there, it will discourage the trash dumpers.”