Kathy Alcott explained the tidiness of the Hopkinton-Webster transfer station when she spotted a piece of newspaper blowing away in the wind.

“I think we’re probably a cleaner, neater transfer station than some others I’ve seen,” she said. “I think that ...”

Alcott, a member of an all-female crew of solid waste employees, stopped to run after the newspaper and return it to its proper area in the recycling center.

“Like this – a woman will stop and grab a piece of trash where I think a guy would just not see that,” she said.

The workforce at the dump has been made up of five women for the past year and a half.

“Customers come in and say things like, ‘It’s so beautiful around here, you can tell it’s run by women,’ ” said Transfer Station Superintendent Jolene Cochrane. “I don’t know if that’s true, because I think it was run just as nicely when it was run by a man.”

It may be run the same, but since the team has been all-female, residents have been asking Cochrane when they’re going to put out a calendar to show off all that girl power.

“We also had a guy who made up whole lists of plays on words,” she said. “One list was names for trash, and one was names for women, so it was the ‘trash chicks’, the ‘dump divas,’ the ‘dump queens.’ ”

Cochrane and the other transfer station workers said they take these types of comments in stride, and they like joking around with residents, who they call their “customers.”

“They never get inappropriate,” Alcott said. “In a male-dominated industry, you tend to get the whole boys’ club thing, but I haven’t experienced that.”

The women of the transfer station are confident that they do their jobs just as well as men could.

“It’s just a job,” Christina Balassone said. “I never thought that this would be what I’d be doing growing up, but it’s been good. It can be a little nasty at times, but it’s all in a day’s work.”

Cochrane said working at the dump can be fun sometimes. She pointed to the electronics recycling area, where thousand-pound stacks of televisions and grills are kept to be smashed with hammers.

“When we work out here, it’s not really work. We get to come and play,” she said.

All kidding aside, the workers expressed a sense of pride in having an all-female team.

“You never would think that this, traditionally a man’s job, would be run by a bunch of girls,” Balassone said. “I guess this just kind of proves that women can do the same things that men can.”

Even so, Cochrane says that she wouldn’t necessarily keep the team all-female if she could.

“Actually, the last person I hired, I asked for a guy,” she said. “Sometimes they know more mechanical stuff, they’ve grown up around equipment and fixing things. I thought it would be nice to have that different intellectual input.”

The station is doing just fine without any Y chromosomes, though.

And from a trash and recycling perspective, everything is going swimmingly, Cochrane said. In the midst of a Chinese crackdown on importing recycled goods that has caused several New Hampshire facilities to shut down their glass-recycling programs, Hopkinton-Webster has kept theirs open. They stockpile their glass products and grind them down to be used as road aggregate.

“We’ve got room to wait it out, and hopefully the recycling will get better,” Cochrane said.

In the meantime, the dump continues to run as usual. And as for the workers? They’re happy with their all-female team.

Alcott said attending workshops at the Department of Environmental Services in Concord, where they are some of the only women in classes full of men, is always an eye opener.

“When you’re the girl in the room, you do stand out,” Alcott said. “But not in a bad way – it’s almost like a point of pride for yourself. You feel like yeah, I can do this with the big boys.”

]]>