Newton NH is a fairly small town- about 5000 people- and has never had public trash collection. The old time weekly ritual of going to the dump is still alive and well in Newton.
When we moved to Newton in 1987, the dump was a classic New England dump. You brought your trash, unsorted, and dumped it into the pile. Periodically they would burn the combustibles out of the pile. In the years since, the dump has become increasingly more sophisticated. Now you sort your trash, and some of it gets recycled. There are various fees now for disposing of certain items. Even the non-recyclable stuff gets hauled away, to a regional landfill or trash-to-energy plant, so in technical lingo the dump is now a transfer station.
This is a WIP, a project started during the "fee-free" weekend in August 2008. The idea of the fee-free weekend was to try and get people to clean up their yards, and it led to especially huge piles of stuff at the dump.
Photos so far have been made using my Canon EOS-3 with the Tokina 19-35, a Canon Elph APS P+S, various film rangefinders, and my digital cameras.
I'm not done with this project yet. There is more to come, so stay tuned...