MARBLEHEAD — At last week’s Board of Health meeting, Director of Public Health Andrew Petty explained that there will be a new traffic route at the transfer station effective April 14.
“So traffic flow, we’re ready to move to the next phase,” Petty said. “We have our transaction hut set up in the recycling area. We have our compactor set up in the commercial recycling area. We’re ready to change the traffic flow at the transfer station. We have signs ordered. We’re ready for temporary signs to go up.”
Starting today, “any permitted vehicle — permitted commercial recycling, permitted resident and permitted landscaping company — will now need to enter into the Green Street entrance.”
“The way that the agreement works is that the gate opens at 7 a.m., but the facility is not open until 7:30 a.m., so they’ll queue inside the facility,” Petty said. “We’ll have them run all the way up that hill, and at the top of the hill, we’ll have it coned off so they can’t enter, and our employees (can) continue to do work.”
This change will address the traffic concerns that were brought to Petty’s attention.
“That was the agreement with the neighbors,” Petty said. “There was concern about queuing up on the street causing traffic issues. We said this is what we would do to alleviate that problem.”
Board of Health member Tom McMahon added that this shift in traffic routes “should make it so no cars would be waiting out on Green Street, causing any traffic issues on that road and provide a little relief for the neighbors.”
McMahon wrote that the West Shore Drive/Beacon Street entrance would only be used to weigh and pay for the pit and compactor moving forward. People who use that entrance for those particular services will also need to use that entrance as an exit, like everyone else who will be now using the Green Street entrance.
He added, “If you use that entrance, you will not be able to drive to the lower portion of the transfer station.”
Petty mentioned at the meeting that “we are in a much better place than we were before” regarding the transfer station.
“We have a brand new compactor. We have a brand new chute. We have a brand new tipping floor,” he said. “Those are three huge accomplishments and are putting us in the right direction.”
Petty added that there are still “a couple fine-tuning pieces that we need to do.”
“We have a safety gate that needs to be installed at the top of the new ladder. We have a safety gate for the pit that was all proposed by the architect when we did the original design. We need to have those items installed at the very edge where the tipping floor goes to the asphalt,” he said. “There’s a slight gap there. There always was a gap there.
“In the past, it was full of dirt. We’re going to try to put a piece of metal there, essentially a piece of diamond plate to fill that in. We don’t need to fill in that void for any reason. What we’re trying to do is fill in some areas, maybe do some additional welding on the floor to try to keep some water out from going down to the basement.”
And regarding recycling, Petty said he was notified that “Republic, which operates Green Work and Danvers, are shut down for construction,” and they will be down until December.
“They’re doing a large upgrade to their recycling facilities, so $25 million is going into Green Works, but that means that we need to move our recycling no longer to Danvers but to Billerica,” he said. “We’re working with waste management to deal with that. Obviously, that’s some additional trucking. We have waste management coming in and hauling bins for us on a regular basis at this point to stay up with all the loads of recycling coming to the facility.
“What they’re trying to do is that they are working on building a polymer factory, a polymer recycling plant, and partnering with the two big companies: Pepsi and Coca Cola. The idea is that Pepsi and Coca-Cola will now recycle up to 50% of plastics back into their bottles. So yes, it’s a positive move, and yes, we want them to make these upgrades; that way, we can have a better recycling market in the future.”
