LEBANON — Marc Morgan began his career in waste management at the bottom, when he helped pay his way through college by emptying trash cans.
As a freshman at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, Morgan was assigned a work-study job as a campus custodian.
Morgan, 49, has come a long way in 30 years.
On Friday, he wrapped up a 12-year stint as Lebanon’s solid waste manager. He’s leaving the city to become assistant commissioner of solid waste for Westchester County (N.Y.), which is just north of New York City and has roughly 1 million residents.
His time in Lebanon was well-spent. Morgan is credited with making Lebanon one of the most progressive municipal waste systems in New Hampshire.
“He always, always kept up on current technology, current alternatives and looked for ways to actually reduce waste while keeping the level of service our users have come to expect,” said Paula Maville, the city’s longtime deputy city manager who retired in August.
When Morgan first arrived in Lebanon in 2010, the city’s landfill and recycling center was just another cog in the state’s waste management sector. Historically, New Hampshire has accepted trash from other states, putting it at risk of running out of space in its landfills. In 2020, just under half of the waste disposed of in New Hampshire was generated out of state.
During his time as solid waste manager, Morgan worked to prevent what he calls Lebanon’s “really valuable hole in the ground” from getting crushed under the weight of trash from neighboring states.
Morgan expanded the city’s recycling program and pioneered the landfill’s Gas to Energy program, which turns methane gas into usable power for the city, and will go online next year. He also started a food waste drop-off program and launched an app to help Lebanon residents track their recycling habits.
“I’m not going to just simply do my job. I’m trying to push it and do a little bit more,” Morgan said.
His work in Lebanon didn’t go unnoticed. He recently received the Northeast Resource Recovery Association’s recycler of the year award for 2022.
“He’s my go-to when referring reporters to people knowledgeable about trash and recycling in New Hampshire,” said Reagan Bissonnette, executive director of the nonprofit association, which helps communities to manage their own recycling, in a news release announcing the award last month.
Morgan’s work at the University of Maine’s Fort Kent campus was only the beginning. After transferring to Keene State, he took a job at the campus’s recycling center. His first job after graduating from college was overseeing the transfer station in Warner, N.H.
Later, he spent eight years with the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services as the state’s recycling coordinator. Morgan was the last person to hold that position. In the late 2000s, the state eliminated the job during budget cuts.
When Morgan started working at the Lebanon landfill, friends and former co-workers were skeptical.
“I had people who were saying, ‘Marc, you were the state recycling coordinator. Now you’re managing a landfill? Why? You’ve gone to the other side,’ ” he said. “But I think, ‘What better position for someone like me who wants to focus on waste diversion, someone who looks at a landfill and thinks, “This is what’s coming in, how are we going to keep it out of here?” ’ ”
The reason he got hired as the state’s recycling coordinator in the first place, Morgan said, was because of his prior experience at transfer stations.
“A number of people at the state don’t have that hands-on background,” Morgan said. “When you look at some initiatives and where they come from, it’s like, from an operations standpoint, that may not make any sense.”
When policymakers pitch him proposed legislation, Morgan said he always asks himself, “Is this really accomplishing what it says it is? Or should we put our energy into something more localized?”
He questions aggressive, broad-stroke waste diversion strategies such as Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law. Morgan just wants to make sure they actually work.
“When Vermont’s law went into effect, a number of large waste generators hauled their waste over far distances to landfill it out of the state,” Morgan said. “They didn’t recycle more. The waste just left.”
Morgan is a solid waste manager with a recycler’s mindset, one that’s been tempered into efficient practicality by a career spent in operations. He doesn’t want to “legislate good decisions” because you can’t “force people to make the right choice.”
In step with the larger infrastructure changes he pioneered, Morgan tried to foster a community-minded zero-waste ethic.
It’s taken time for some people to buy into the Refill Not Landfill campaign, in which Morgan ran a series of community meetings about trash reduction at the personal level.
“I heard a lot of people say things like, ‘I can’t afford to buy a $30 Hydroflask,’ ” Morgan said. “You just perceive that you can’t afford it, but you can go to Listen and buy a reusable cup for $1.”
Morgan added that the physical beauty of the Upper Valley has actually been an obstacle to inspiring an environmental ethic.
“You look outside and you could think to yourself, ‘What environmental problems? This is beautiful. There are no issues, there are no concerns. Why do you care if I use a disposable cup?’ ” he said.
Morgan is confident the city will continue its progressive waste management practices. “There’s a lot of really good people in the city doing good work,” he said. “Lebanon’s become a leader in this industry, and I think they want to keep it that way.”
Assistant City Engineer Erica Douglas is taking over as interim solid waste manager while Lebanon searches for Morgan’s replacement.
Before his departure, Morgan hired Andy Hodgdon, Norwich’s former public works director, as the landfill’s scale house manager.
“I’m going to miss him,” Hodgdon said of Morgan. “He’s really just thinking all the time.”
Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.