It was 3:56 a.m., and Sebastian Gurciullo was on his first cup of coffee.

Gurciullo, Middletown’s Assistant Superintendent of Sanitation, was sitting in the department’s break room when he got word that a trash truck driver had called out for the pre-dawn shift.

“You probably don’t think about these things as a resident,” he said. 

Gurciullo sat below a map of Middletown’s sanitation district and a poster.

“Presidents are temporary, Wu-Tang is forever,” it read.

Wearing a green reflective vest, he was not terribly excited to talk to a college reporter at 4 a.m., but he was going to make sure the trucks got out, one way or another.

Gurciullo oversees the first step in a complex system of hauling, sorting, repackaging, and then selling Middletown’s recycling. Over the past few weeks, The Argus interviewed municipal administrators, sustainability directors, collection truck drivers, material recovery facility directors, anaerobic digester operators, and compost hauling specialists to understand what happens to the University’s waste. If you toss a candy wrapper in the trash, where does it go?

Beneath the public information campaigns and blue recycling bins exists a complicated web of international economic policy, congressional inaction, and Green Mountain Coffee at 4 a.m. every Friday morning.

The Start

Middletown’s waste management process begins with the consumer. Like any city, Middletown deals with contamination of recycled materials.

“People that are not in compliance are usually not homeowners,” Gurciullo said. “They’re renters down in the North End. That’s where we get the problems.”

Gurciullo said contamination occurs most often when residents bag their recyclables in plastic, which is not a recyclable material. Middletown truck driver Ronnie Hills said that residents sometimes put grass clippings, leaves, or other organic materials into the recycling bin, confusing the blue bin for composting.

“Sometimes they even throw garbage in there,” Hills said. “I think it’s just laziness, to be honest with you.”

The consistency with which residences at the University follow Middletown’s trash and recycling regulations varies across different parts of campus.

“Wesleyan is usually pretty good,” Gurciullo added. “But some students, especially [in] the Low Rise, they’ll just throw anything in there.”

Hills is one of five drivers who man the collection fleet every morning, covering the city’s 2,000-residence sanitation district before bringing the materials to the All-American Material Recovery Facility (MRF) in Berlin, Conn. The University campus exists inside the curbside sanitation district, although the school also maintains dumpsters operated by AllWaste, according to the University’s Associate Director of Facilities Management Jeffrey Sweet.

On the collection route, The Argus followed Hills’ truck down Middletown’s High Street, where he began the morning collection shift. 

The sides of the trucks are emblazoned with the message “Keep Middletown ‘Clean.’”

“I don’t know why ‘clean’ is in quotes,” Gurciullo said. “It’s always been like that.”

Single-Stream Wishcycling

On a screen inside the truck, Hills showed The Argus a live video feed of the container’s dumped materials. That residence had put flowers in their recycling bin, he said, a non-compliance act he would report to Gurciullo.

Once City Hall receives notice of non-compliance, they send the resident a letter, Middletown Sustainability Coordinator Kim O’Rourke told The Argus. If residents continue to ignore contamination notices, she said, the City levies a $99 fine against them. Gurciullo agreed that the fine was effective.

“If you hit them in the pocket where it hurts, then they’ll stop,” Gurciullo said. 

Fines only occur with consistent misuse, and O’Rourke prefers to point residents to the State’s “RecyclingCT Wizard,” an online encyclopedia where residents can check the recyclability of common materials (Styrofoam is a no, as is shredded paper and loose bottle caps, but pizza boxes free of food residue make for good cardboard).

O’Rourke estimates Middletown’s contamination rates range from 4–20%. While residential rates generally hover around 6%, those rates are brought up by the contanimation rates in public-access dumpsters, which are difficult to monitor. If rates rise above 18%, the MRF charges $135.19 a ton.

Most often, however, O’Rourke believes people are acting out of too-good intentions called “wishcycling.”

“People wish, ‘It should be [recyclable],’ so they put it in the cart,” O’Rourke said. “Because that’s one of the problems that we had in marketing our recyclables as a country. It wasn’t clean. There was so much junk going in there.”

One obvious culprit for the contamination is single-stream recycling, where paper, glass, aluminum, plastic, and all types of recyclable materials are put into one bin. Middletown switched from dual to single-stream in the late ’90s, O’Rourke estimated, when MRFs were also switching to single-stream.

“We dragged our feet,” O’Rourke said. “But all the MRFs were going single-stream, because they’re connected to the haulers, and it saved the haulers money by combining them.”

The University’s Sustainability Director Jennifer Kleindienst was less sparing when she described the problem to The Argus in a Nov. 12, 2019 article written by then-Editor-in-Chief Emmy Hughes ’20.

“Single-stream recycling…is probably the worst idea we’ve ever had,” Kleindienst said.

China’s Ban on Foreign Recycling

As O’Rourke alluded, the local contamination problem exposes a national problem: dirty recycling. 

After importing (and buying) American recycling for thirty years, China announced a practical ban on foreign recycling in 2017: Operation National Sword (technically, recycling with contamination rates below 0.5%  still qualifies for Chinese import, but that level of contamination would be practically impossible to achieve in our current system).

Before 2017, China accepted almost half of American exported recycling. Overnight, the market for recycling dropped.

“But I don’t necessarily think that the China [National] Sword was a bad thing,” O’Rourke said. “We should not be shipping these materials overseas for someone else to deal with our trash.”

The buildup in supply due to public pressure campaigns to increase consumer recycling still far exceeds domestic demand.

“We used to always get paid for recycling, even single stream,” O’Rourke said.

By 2016, however, slowing international demand resulted in what recycling facilities call a “zero tip” (Tip fees refer to the payment or reimbursement received per ton by the disposer for disposing of recycling in a recovery facility).

In 2018, however, the tip fees for single-stream recycling jumped to $60 a ton, peaking in 2023 at $100 a ton, based on spreadsheets shared by the city’s sustainability office. Even cardboard, often a profit generator, cost almost $90 a ton to dispose of in 2022. While cardboard tip fees are now at zero, these costs almost equaled the tonnage fee for trash for the first time, which was $93 in 2023. The City’s 2025 contract charges $124 per ton of trash disposal.

Where Does It All Go?

In fiscal year 2024, the University diverted just over half of all waste (51.5%, excluding construction waste). The majority of diversion was the result of recycling (801 tons) and compost (247 tons), according to data shared by the University’s Office of Sustainability.

While that diversion rate had been increasing through 2019, it has not recovered from the pandemic. This performance can largely be attributed to diminished recycling results. In the years before the pandemic, the University’s recycling rate held consistently around 54%. In 2020, the recycling rate plummeted to just 35.4%, and it had just marginally recovered to 37% by 2024.

The University does bale and sell cardboard directly to paper mills, Environmental Services Director Bill Nelligan wrote to The Argus. When the University first purchased balers in 2013, they received $80 to $90 a ton in foreign markets, Kleindienst told The Argus in 2019. Now, in 2025, Nelligan wrote that they only net $10 to $55 a ton. 

“I do not see that changing in the near future,” Nelligan wrote.

But most recyclable materials still end up at the All-American Waste MRF.

The All-American Waste facility, a $40 million project opened in 2022, processes up to 50 tons in an hour, and 1,000 tons a day, the Business West Magazine reports. It uses optical scanners, which can identify and separate materials based on chemical composition, to quality control the final mixed-paper line before baling. The scanners specifically are intended to target paper, cardboard, boxboard, glass, and five plastics, including the highly profitable PET (from water and soda bottles) and HDPE (from food containers).

One goal, AllWaste Outreach Specialist Madelyn Bond wrote in an email, has been to adapt to the “Amazon effect,” where the recycling stream, once full of clean newspaper, now relies on cardboard boxes and shipping envelopes.

“We really need policy change”

In an attempt to minimize contamination and eke out any possible profit, O’Rourke encourages residents to source separate their recycling at the City’s transfer station.

O’Rourke pointed to one shack where the town accepts car batteries, antifreeze, and food scraps.

“Weird collection,” O’Rourke said.

The station, accessible to Middletown taxpayers, also collects books for paper recycling, e-waste, air conditioners, refrigerators (freon extracted), mattresses, glass, and cardboard.

“You can put your glass in the curbside bin,” O’Rourke said. “But the uber-recyclers bring it here.”

That effort allows Middletown to sell the clean glass directly to Strategic Materials, an MRF in South Windsor, Conn. 

But without private buy-in from manufacturing firms, these recycling efforts only go so far.

“Towns can only do so much,” O’Rourke said. “And this is where Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) comes in. We need the producers to come into our circle and share the responsibility of the end of life of those products.”

For example, the producers of mattresses and e-waste pay for their recycling, lifting the burden off of towns and cities.

“They provide the container, they come in and pick up the mattresses, and then they pay to have them dismantled and recycled,” O’Rourke said.

While Maine, Colorado, and California have passed EPR for packaging laws, when Connecticut attempted to pass it in 2023, the effort was paused until four other states—one of which must border Connecticut—implemented their own policies.

“I’ve done this for 30 years,” O’Rourke said, “and I’m so worried that 30 years from now, there’s gonna be a different Recycling Coordinator standing here doing the same thing, spinning their wheels. We really need policy change.”

Thomas Lyons can be reached tlyons@wesleyan.edu.