The Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority is Connecticut’s Recycling Leader. While to some, “recycling” may mean turning old aluminum cans into new ones or processing newspapers into paper towels, CRRA reuses just about everything it collects. CRRA was created to reduce the state’s dependence on landfills for trash disposal. Here’s how we do it:

• Eighty percent of the refuse we take in is recycled into electricity at our trash-to-energy plants.
• We collect more than 130,000 tons of paper, glass, steel and aluminum for processing into all sorts of materials. The napkins used at your dinner table, the carpeting in your office, the materials used to build your new sun deck and the can holding your favorite cold drink may all have come from recycled materials. Making products from recycled materials requires less energy and less natural resources.
• Until the Hartford landfill accepted its final deliveries on Dec. 31, 2008, CRRA had been placing a limited amount of bulky and non-processible waste there. (This material is now being trucked to privately-owned out-of-state landfills.) As this material decomposes, it gives off methane gas. We capture that gas and burn it to generate electricity.

Recycling with CRRA saves you and your city or town money. Each of our member towns pays us a per-ton fee for accepting its garbage. We charge our member towns nothing for recycling. So the more you recycle, the less garbage you throw away and the less trash disposal costs your town.

Connecticut's trash-to-energy system has been a success: when the Windsor-Bloomfield landfill closes, which could happen as soon as 2015 Connecticut will be the first state in the union with no active garbage landfills.