Once upon a time, and maybe even to this day, Canterbury was a member of a multi-town trash cooperative that existed to negotiate how much it would cost to send the co-op’s trash to the incinerator in Penacook, as well as figure out how to reduce that waste. Your meat wrappers, banana peels, disposable diapers go up in flames, creating energy that doesn’t require burning fossil fuels. Like magic, it just all disappears. Well, almost disappears. As everyone with a wood stove knows, nothing burned this way completely disappears. There’s ash left over. And so one of the things the incinerator deals with, and we pay for, is disposing of ash. 

Back in 2005, the co-op was in a pricing dispute with the incinerator owners over how much to pay to dispose of each ton of trash. The co-op decided to bypass the incinerator altogether and looked for land to build their own landfill. Voila! Muchyedo Banks in Canterbury, at the intersection of Riverland and Oxbow Pond Roads, was purchased for that purpose. So what if practically the entire area is sand, clearly the most stable of soils? So what if geological studies showed the area was unstable, completely unsuitable to contain whatever’s on land from going into the Merrimack River? Years away, millennia even.

Canterbury was less than thrilled, and started figuring out how to keep this from happening. Our state rep at the time, Frank Tupper, filed legislation. The town talked to lawyers. Environmental groups, primarily the Oxbow Initiative, funded geological studies. Canterbury didn’t want to be just a NIMBY; we wanted to show we knew solid waste disposal was a problem, and that it was up to us to prove that we could reduce the amount of solid waste we generated.

But Canterbury was a mandatory recycling town, which meant everything we were recycling already didn’t go to be incinerated. What more could we do? And the answer: Pay As You Throw, or PAYT. Canterbury was putting its money where its mouth was. And in October 2006, after lots of research, planning, and outreach by the Recycling Committee (yes, Virginia, Canterbury used to have a recycling committee), the Board of Selectmen adopted PAYT.

PAYT helped, but what really turned the metaphorical tide against locating the co-op’s landfill in Canterbury was Mother Nature. She knew that eventually we would have enough rain to cause the trash to flow into the Merrimack. She also knew that the landfill proponents wouldn’t believe it until they came face to face with disintegrating sandbanks that were supposed to hold back the trash. So she brought on the Mother’s Day Flood of 2006, a foot of rain over three days.

And this confluence of events explains why, four years after the flood, Muchyedo Banks became not a landfill, but a property managed by the state of New Hampshire (in a complicated purchase with help from Canterbury, the Society for the Protection of NH Forests, the state of New Hampshire, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and others) to protect wildlife, both on the land and in the river. And that is how Canterbury’s continuing commitment to recycling manifests itself to this day with the PAYT program. It’s a story with a happy ending and one that we can all be proud of.

~ Patrice Rasche