BELFAST - Outside the office of the transfer station it was raining. Inside, Steve Roberts was talking about which kind of trash goes to PERC. 

"MSW," he said.

PERC is Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. The Orrington-based company serves 178 communities and generates energy from burning MSW.

Sandy Carey, the transfer station's newly hired manager was standing on a milk crate in front of the siding glass window where residents pay sticker fees of $2.50 per bag to offload their own MSW.

"Municipal Solid Waste is what that stands for," she said.

Carey is the first ever manager of the Belfast Transfer Station. This might be a surprise to some residents, who have come to associate Roberts and his unflagging good humor with the otherwise mundane chore of going to the dump.

Roberts opened the transfer station in 1992 and is officially an employee of the Public Works department. Asked if he has a title in relation to the transfer station, he offered "transfer station operator," but in a way that suggested no title would be fine, too.

Carey worked most recently at Midcoast Solid Waste Corp., the Rockport landfill and transfer station that serves Lincolnville, Camden, Rockport and Hope. 

On her first week in Belfast, she was still new enough to realize that a reporter might not know the the acronym for Municipal Solid Waste, which is the industry's term for household garbage.

"Or is it?" said Roberts.

Carey gave a laugh of recognition. "Oh yeah, what do they call it now?"

Thumbing through a thick operations manual she found the term: putrescible waste.

"I couldn't even find it in the dictionary," she said, dryly.

"Not our old one," Roberts said, pointing a bookshelf behind him.

Aside from a steady steam of Public Works trucks loaded with fallen limbs, the intermittent downpours from Hurricane Sandy (a coincidence not lost on Carey, who joked that she'd waited 50 years to have a hurricane named after her) made for an unusually quiet day at the Belfast Transfer Station.

The rains also brought a welcome reprieve from questions about a planned expansion of the facility's plastics recycling program. Word had been out for a while now but the delayed shipment of a baler for compacting the plastics had set the launch over a month behind schedule. Based on the amount of interest from residents, the transfer station staff was anticipating a kind of tsunami effect in the near future.

"I think we're going to get bombarded because all those people are saving [the other kinds of plastics] up because they know we're going to take it," said Carey. "If we had the storage, we could probably start taking things now, but we don't."

Roberts agreed. 

"It'll be unbelievable," he said, "But it will level off after about a month or so."

Belfast, for all its progressive leanings, has lagged behind nearby municipalities in recycling consumer plastics. The transfer station currently accepts #2 HDPE (milk jugs and laundry bottles, mostly) and redeemable #1 PET (soda bottles). Everything else goes either with household waste (that's MSW or putrescible waste) or into the large dumpsters for demolition debris.

The delay has not been for lack of interest. Popular demand for more recycling has been there, but after some five years of intermittently looking for ways to accept more materials, there wasn't an obvious way to do it.

Going to a "single-stream" system, where all recyclables are collected in one container and trucked to a remote facility for separation and resale, proved too costly based on transportation to and from the closest service, ecomaine in Portland. Neighboring towns, including Northport and Monroe have made single stream arrangements with private vendors, but what's worked for smaller towns wouldn't have necessarily scaled up to what the city needed.

Options for retrofitting or expanding the transfer station building were limited by the existing configuration of the buildings and grounds.

Ultimately the city ordered the baler that will allow the transfer station to accept plastics numbered 1-7. The custom-built machine was approved for purchase in May and ordered from a distributor in Whitefield in August, to be built by a manufacturer in Philadelphia. City officials expected it to arrive in mid-September, but as of Tuesday no one was quite sure where it was or when it would turn up.

Then again, neither Carey, Roberts or the other workers seemed especially worried about getting buried under 3s, 5s and 7s when the baler does arrive. The possibility was just out there somewhere, sort of like the baler itself.

In preparation for accepting more plastics, the crew recently reorganized the chutes that line the side of the transfer station's main building. All the paper products are now on one end. Non-redeemable green and brown glass is no longer separated by color (the material has almost no post-consumer resale value and is typically used as inert fill). The "good cause" chute collecting 5- and 15-cent deposit bottles for a rotating slate of charities, clubs and nonprofits was moved near the office.

Part of the goal was to streamline things on the inside of the building. The other was to free up two chutes for the new plastics. One for #1 plastic, and the other for numbers 3 through 7. High-density polyethylene, #2, has a high enough resale value that it will continue to have its own chute. The rearranging has confused some residents, but on the inside there's a logic to it.

"We're trying in our minds to see what will happen here, so it's efficient," said Roberts.

This fall the station started separating asphalt shingles from construction debris, setting up an area next to one set aside for tires, which came out of the dumpsters for recycling in 2009.

Carey is hoping to bring in a Planet Aid bin for collecting clothing. At Midcoast Solid Waste, she said, residents brought in 600-700 pounds of clothing a month. The population served by MCSW is about double that of the Belfast Transfer Station, but, she said, "it all adds up."

Penobscot Bay Pilot reporter Ethan Andrews can be reached at ethanandrews@penbaypilot.com