Business and residents duke it out as New Bedford waste costs spiral

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If the solid-waste truck hauling business located at 781 Church St. in New Bedford was any more hidden away, it might be invisible.

WIN Waste Innovations, a regional waste and recycling management company headquartered in Portsmouth, N.H., has quietly operated a trash truck storage facility for several years at the location about a ¼ mile off Church Street in New Bedford’s North End.

The address, situated along the recently restored South Coast rail line and hidden by a small woods away from a nearby working class/commercial section of Church Street, in some ways seems the perfect location for the kind of waste processing/transfer station that Tim Cusson wants to build about a mile up the road in the New Bedford Business Park.

Except that it isn’t.

In addition to being beautifully situated along the rail line and at a distance from the nearest neighborhood, 781 Church St. is located just across Route 140 from the Acushnet Cedar Swamp, a federally and state protected wetland, and one of the largest cedar pine swamps in Massachusetts.

Therefore, 781 Church St. is probably not going to be playing a big role in helping New Bedford control its rapidly escalating waste disposal costs.

A perplexing problem

WIN Waste is just the tip of a very active waste and recycling economy in the City of New Bedford at a time when waste disposal has evolved into one of the most expensive line items for government and private enterprises. 

There is also money to be made in the private sector in waste disposal and processing for the city. There are no fewer than four major waste haulers and/or processors working in New Bedford. Another handful of businesses work in the bottle/can redemption business, and there are businesses for recycling specific products like scrap metal and used tires.

Though WIN Waste’s Church Street operation may be secluded, the rapidly escalating cost of solid waste disposal in New Bedford is very evident.

In just two years — between Fiscal Year 2023 and Fiscal Year 2025 — the city’s waste collection budget increased by $3.3 million, from $5.4 million to $8.7 million, according to the city’s annual budget report.

The cost of disposing of sewage has grown even more rapidly than solid waste in the city those last two years. The city’s Wastewater Enterprise Fund increased by $5.8 million between Fiscal Year 2023 and Fiscal Year 2025, from $25.8 million to $31.6 million.

These numbers have gotten the attention of both public officials and the business community.

City Hall may be worried about rising waste and sewage costs but residents of one Far North End neighborhood are even more worried that the government, and an enterprising local businessman, are willing to solve the problem of skyrocketing prices on their backs.

Pine Hill Acres and adjacent neighborhoods are some of the most solidly middle-class neighborhoods in the city. But they are located next to a proposed business that could go a ways toward helping the city control its solid waste costs. The residents are deeply skeptical that this type of business can be done in a manner that will protect their handsome neighborhood. That just seems like common sense.

Tim Cusson, meanwhile, is a Dartmouth guy who is a regional vice president for the diversified real estate development company Parallel Products. He’s been working for most of the past decade on a plan for the company to expand its Business Park bottle-and-can recycling operation into a solid waste processing and transfer facility. His 100 Duchaine Blvd. address is directly across Phillips Road from Pine Hill Acres.

Cusson’s entrance into the Business Park has itself become controversial. In 2015, at Mayor Jon Mitchell’s recommendation and the City Council’s approval, his proposal to move his bottle-and-can recycling business there was granted a special tax assessment (STA), reducing his property taxes. He had previously run his bottle-and-can recycling operation on an industrial area of Shawmut Avenue.

Cusson has since moved his business to a separate Business Park location without the STA. After a cease-and-desist order from the Conservation Commission, he’s since enclosed the operation.

There is reason to be skeptical of his business.

The former longtime executive director of the Business Park, Tom Davis, has said that prior to his 2014 retirement he had blocked Cusson’s operation from the park after discovering the neighbors of a Cusson-operated Taunton recycling business complained of smells and mess associated with it.

Cusson’s first plan was to develop land at the former Polaroid film factory into a regional facility that would process both biosolids (sewage sludge) and solid waste at the site, separate out the recyclables, and ship some of the products out on the increased speeds of the new rail line. The facility, originally out in the open, has now been enclosed.

Cusson was developing his waste business plans in 2019 even as the city’s waste costs had already begun to rise. At the time, the city was already paying $2 million a year to transport sludge out of the city. The city government in 2018 entered into an agreement with Fall River and Brockton to build something called an anaerobic digester on Shawmut Avenue, in an industrial area of New Bedford about a mile south of 781 Church St. The Greater New Bedford Regional Refuse Management District, which runs the Crapo Hill Landfill in Dartmouth, ran a pilot program for an anaerobic digester until last June.

An anaerobic digester is a sealed structure that breaks down organic waste and the city would have processed the stuff for all three communities. It was a money-making opportunity for the city.

The Shawmut Avenue project never got off the ground and at the same time Cusson was talking about his plan to move into sewage sludge and solid waste at the Business Park. 

A problem of life savings

Soon after the news got around about Cusson’s plans in the Business Park, the abutting residential neighbors became suspicious. Some of them had feared the fumes and emissions from the old Polaroid factory and what they considered a significant number of cancer cases in their neighborhood. They talked about their life savings being tied up in their homes and now their neighborhood was going to be devalued by being adjacent to a sewage and solid waste processing operation. They especially feared the rumble of large numbers of trucks hauling the waste to the proposed plant every day.

For six years, the residents and their group, Citizens Against the Parallel Products Project (CAPPP), have intrepidly opposed both the sewage sludge facility that was originally proposed for the operation and the remaining solid waste proposal. During that time, many of them have evolved into environmental activists themselves.

The residents believe that they have the misfortune of having purchased property that is adjacent to an ideal spot to ship out waste and recyclables via the restored rail line to Boston.

“This is all tied to rail,” said Tracy Wallace, vice president of South Coast Neighbors United, in a recent interview with me.

Some of the resident activists are monitoring the activities of Parallel Products, which has now named the Business Park operation South Coast Renewables. Earlier this winter an anonymous complaint was filed with the Department of Environmental Protection about illegal dumping of solid waste and construction materials at the site.

“Imagine how careless they’ll be if they’re granted the approval to do it!” wrote Wendy Morrill, president of South Coast Neighbors United, in a Dec. 13 Facebook post.

At a public hearing last November, neighbors, as well as residents across the city, pleaded with the Department of Environmental Protection to deny South Coast Renewables a permit to operate.

Since that hearing, New Bedford has been waiting to see if DEP gives South Coast Renewables a permit to construct the waste processing and transfer station in the Business Park. They have expressed frustration that it took DEP two years to schedule the meeting.

If DEP gives a thumbs-up, the only avenue to stop the operation will be the city Health Board’s oversight or a court case. But if it says no, then New Bedford will have to think harder about its escalating waste costs, and maybe even increase the emphasis on controlling how much waste its residents produce.

Cusson acknowledges that the abutting residential neighbors should be concerned by a potentially unpleasant operation like his but he also said it is important for them to be “educated” about what he is doing and what he is not doing. Cusson frames the issue as Parallel Products taking advantage of an opportunity and starting a business that will help the city solve a problem that is about to get worse. 

That’s because the Crapo Hill Landfill, which is located just over the town line in Dartmouth, is set to close in the not-too-distant future. Crapo Hill is where both the city and town of Dartmouth dump their solid waste without having to pay expensive tipping fees to an outside entity or money to transport the stuff a greater distance. The city’s share of the dumping is about 85%.

South Coast Renewables will help offset some of the increased costs, Cusson said.

“This really saves the residents of Dartmouth and New Bedford a lot of money,” he told me.

Mayor Mitchell in 2022 negotiated a deal with South Coast Renewables that would allow it to separate recyclables from solid waste and ship them out from the Business Park site. In return, South Coast Renewables agreed not to process and ship out the sewage sludge, as it had originally proposed.

The Mitchell/South Coast Renewables deal provided that the waste transfer station would pay New Bedford a fee of $2 per ton for all waste processed at the site. The mayor has estimated that would bring the city $800,000 in the first year. 

The agreement also stipulated that the city would only be charged the lowest tipping fees that the company charged any other entity that shipped waste to it and that the hundreds of trucks carrying waste would be kept off Phillips Road, the nearest street to Pine Hill Acres. 

Mitchell at the time of the July 2022 announcement of the arrangement with Parallel framed it as protecting public health and safety for the neighborhood while at the same time bringing a financial benefit to the city, with specific funds targeted for the Pine Hill Acres area. 

 “We made clear from the start that any expansion must protect public health and safety, mitigate environmental risks, and offset the impact to nearby neighborhoods,” Mitchell said at the time he announced the deal. “By eliminating biosolids from the plan and securing significant financial benefits for neighbors, this agreement achieves those goals and more.”

The mayor pointed out that Crapo Hill landfill may get an additional five years of use beyond the five years it has left with the construction of new cells at the site, but he acknowledged that with the state’s strict landfill regulations, New Bedford’s waste bills will increase further.

“It’s inevitably going to cost us a lot more in the long run,” he said. “There’s no good solution except to recycle more and consume less,” he said.

The opponents, however, have not been convinced. They say that any future mayor could abrogate the agreement simply because circumstances have changed or even because he or she wanted to. A future mayor could even allow the processing of sewage sludge to be brought back.

The neighbors and activists are also disappointed in what they see as DEP’s failure to pay attention to legitimate environmental issues connected to the South Coast Renewables project that they have brought to their attention.

“These state agencies were supposed to protect the people and communities and are doing the exact opposite,” said Wallace.

Different approaches to the problem

The standoff between Mitchell and the members of South Coast Neighbors United and CAPPP is at the heart of why it’s so challenging for New Bedford to solve the problem of escalating costs of solid waste disposal. How do you address the issue of exponentially increasing costs without trampling on the quality of life of a particular section of the city? 

The activists say there are other solutions to the escalating costs that avoid producing large amounts of waste, like a citywide composting program and financial incentives for minimum refuse disposal.

“We can do our own homegrown solution as a community,” said Morrill. “We’re not taking the time to look into these things.”

Cusson says he agrees with the goal of zero waste and 100% recycling, but cities and towns need an affordable way to dispose of waste now.

Crapo Hill Landfill officials estimate their site — which includes a gas-to-energy plant for fumes produced by the dump — has an additional four or five years left, maybe another five after that if they can figure out how to build a new cell in its mounds of refuse. 

The regional refuse district which runs the landfill estimates it has saved New Bedford and Dartmouth $75 million in solid waste disposal costs in the 30-plus years it has operated.

Cusson says he doubts Crapo has the six or seven years estimated by the city left. “When it closes, the local communities are going to face sticker shock,” he said.

A lot of players

The WIN Waste Innovations operation at 781 Church St. and the South Coast Renewables business at 100 Duchaine Blvd. are just two of multiple solid waste players in New Bedford. There are a lot of people making money off the contemporary waste economy and a lot of effort by the city government too.

E.L. Harvey & Sons Inc., of Westborough, formerly the city’s municipal trash hauler, continues to operate a busy transfer station at 1245 Shawmut Ave. That transfer station accepts both solid waste and bulky items from all parties inside and outside the city, but has a minimum 1-ton charge. E.L Harvey also offers commercial and residential hauling service in four South Coast communities. Their operation is also located in the North End and on Shawmut Avenue, just another mile or so south of the WIN Waste Innovations site. 

And on the same street as the Harvey transfer station, the City of New Bedford, at 1103 Shawmut Ave., operates its own recycling center. That locale also used to be a transfer station on behalf of the city. It was operated by ABC Disposal, the predecessor of E.L. Harvey as the city’s municipal waste hauler. That transfer station was closed when the city’s contract with Harvey ran out in 2023.

The city replaced Harvey with Capitol Weight Services of Boston as its municipal waste hauler that same year, even though its bid was $875,000 higher than Harvey’s. Capitol charged more but the mayor, at the time the new contract was announced, described the company as “the most complete and reliable” vendor. The city had fought, and won, a bitter court battle against Harvey and its predecessor when it tried to renegotiate for higher hauling payments when China stopped purchasing American recyclables.

Jonathan Darling, the city’s public information officer, attributed the especially high increases in the city’s waste disposal budget the last couple years to changes in the solid waste and recycling markets in recent years. 

At a City Council budget hearing in 2024, Jennifer Vieira, the head of the city’s Fleet and Facilities Management department, explained to councilors that after the market for recyclables collapsed, haulers insisted on charging the city for waste by the ton. “You’re not going to find a hauler who will give you a flat rate” anymore, Vieira told the council. 

Thus the latest big jump in the solid waste hauling budget the last two years.

Darling chalked up the corresponding increases in the wastewater budget to the rising cost of complying with expensive EPA mandates governing sewage.

A worldwide problem  

Everything in the waste disposal markets is changing, and most of it is getting more expensive.

The UN Environment Programme cited these costs in a February 2024 report “Global Waste Management Outlook 2024.”

“Municipal solid waste generation is predicted to grow from 2.1 billion tonnes in 2023 to 3.8 billion tonnes by 2050,” it wrote. “Without urgent action on waste management, by 2050 this global annual cost could almost double to a staggering USD 640.3 billion.”

Those changes have worked their way down to the local level.

The city’s recycling operation at 1103 Shawmut Ave. no longer accepts residents’ big white goods like stoves, refrigerators, TVs, mattresses, as recycling them is expensive. E.L. Harvey will accept the big white goods but residents have to pay a fee at its 1204 Shawmut Ave. site. Operations that recycle mattresses, like one at the South Coast Renewables site, have sprung up as the state has banned the objects from landfills.

All these changes have one thing in common: There’s a lot of money at stake.

The use of the 781 Church St. property by the New Bedford Housing Authority is a good example of how any large trash producing operation is struggling with rising waste costs. According to Housing Authority Executive Director Steven Beauregard, his federal agency, with its 2,500 units, is the second largest hauler of trash in New Bedford.

The land WIN Waste leases at 781 Church St. is owned by a business entity named Church Street LLC. The limited liability company is the successor to Frade’s Disposal, which was for decades a local, family-owned private hauler in the city. WIN Waste leases a portion of the Church Street property and a construction company leases another portion of it and the New Bedford Housing Authority also uses a portion.

The New Bedford Housing Authority drops off recyclables from its closed-out apartment at 781 Church St. — mattresses and metal goods, among them. The authority has a $2.9 million three-year contract with WIN Waste to haul the stuff away. Beauregard says the arrangement is allowing the agency to deal with the escalating disposal costs.

“We used to get money for the white goods,” Beauregard said, noting the era before the international recyclable markets collapsed. Now you have to pay to have someone take them away, he said.

The Housing Authority’s budget has seen a similar exponential increase to the city’s the last couple of years. The cost of its waste and recyclable hauling contract increased by $2.1 million for its latest three-year contract. It went from $890,000 to $3 million, according to Beauregard.

Beauregard said he’s not sure how anyone is going to solve the waste cost problem going forward. “This is going to be a hard market. Trash is going to be a serious, serious problem,” he said.

It’s interesting how the Housing Authority recycled materials from cleaned out apartments landed at the 781 Church St. site.

Beauregard said that when he learned the city’s 1103 transfer station was closing several years ago, he agreed to have Frade’s Disposal, and now its successor WIN Waste, pick up his dumpsters. The Housing Authority’s own trucks also bring recyclables like the mattresses and metal furniture to the 781 Church St. site. 

The authority may not be in luck with the 781 Church St. location much longer, however, as several sources say the property is on the verge of being sold for a non-waste related purpose. Rick Frade did not return two New Bedford Light phone calls about the sale of the property that has been owned by his family for decades.

Cost vs. consumption

The cost of disposing of waste may be the driving factor in the trash budget of New Bedford, but some environmentalists believe that the government’s failure to reduce the production of waste is the real problem. They recommend innovative approaches to controlling waste production like recycling and composting. 

Officials with the Conservation Law Foundation take this approach. They have also described their opposition to Cusson’s Business Park proposal in terms of the concept of “environmental justice.” 

That’s an argument that the evidence shows low-income communities like New Bedford are more likely to be the site of environmental degradation than other places. State regulations say those communities must be compensated for their losses and should not be further degraded. 

New Bedford has a long history of environmental contamination. There are closed landfills at Sullivan’s Ledge (which is leaking), and Parker Street, a remediated site where both the city’s high school and a middle school have been built. There was a Superfund cleanup site both at Sullivan’s and in New Bedford Harbor, and the CLF points out New Bedford has one of the highest incidents of lead poisoning from its aging infrastructure in the state.

“Clearly the city is dealing with a lot of environmental burdens,” said Alexandra St. Pierre, the CLF director of communities and toxins. The CLF spoke in opposition to Parallel Products’ application for the transfer station at the November public hearing.

St. Pierre pointed out that Massachusetts has 2.5 million tons of excess transfer station capability. There are other places for the city to take its waste.

“Who is benefiting?” from the proposal in the New Bedford Business Park, St. Pierre asked. “It’s clearly benefiting Parallel Products,” she said.

“We just don’t want to see (New Bedford) continue to be a dumping ground for companies to make a profit out of it without there being any real benefits to the citizens of New Bedford.”

There doesn’t seem to be a solution that is fair to both property taxpayers and the city’s residential neighborhoods. The activists don’t think the private sector has the big picture involving the problem of waste production in mind. “These companies want to do the quickest and fastest turnarounds for revenues,” Morrill said.

Beauregard talked about a tour that he said WIN Waste Services gave him of a well-run incinerator site in the town of Millbury that includes the kind of technology that might solve some of the environmental problems, but not necessarily the costs. 

“You don’t smell a thing, you don’t see a thing,” he said. Millbury is a suburb of Worcester.

It’s hard to envision New Bedford building an incinerator anywhere within its land-poor borders, almost all of which is densely populated. Maybe the Crapo Hill landfill just over the town line in Dartmouth after it closes. But environmentalists would certainly object to an incinerator, not to mention neighborhoods abutting the landfill.

Wendy Morrill’s group toured an anaerobic digester in Quincy one time and learned that even that technology leaves a fluid byproduct.

In the meantime, the costs of waste disposal continue to rise and every producer of waste in the city wonders what the solution is.

In the words of Steve Beauregard describing his gratitude for the drop-off location at 781 Church St. that may soon go away.

“What would I do with all this stuff if I didn’t have a place to haul it?”

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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