The sun was shining brightly at 7 a.m. at the Steamship Authority last week, and in the air was the smell of trash. Trucks were lined up waiting to fill the first freight boat to the mainland, including one tractor trailer carrying 20 to 30 tons of Island garbage. It was headed for Rochester, where trash is burned for electricity.

Michael Sedlier goes off-Island four days a week driving one of those truck. He works for Bruno’s Rolloff, Inc., taking trash or recyclable materials to one of the disposal facilities located in eastern Massachusetts.

Martha’s Vineyard produces a huge amount of trash per year — more than 33,000 tons annually, according to the Island Plan, compiled by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission. Still, Mr. Sedlier remarked, people generally do not know what becomes of it all once it leaves the Island. So he agreed to take a Gazette reporter on his usual run.

“Nobody that I know understands what happens to it until you actually go there and physically see it,” said Mr. Sedlier.

Equally unimaginable is the large scale of the trash disposal system.

Once on the mainland, and after an hour of driving, Mr. Sedlier pulled into the incinerator facility in Rochester known as SEMASS. It’s 95 acres of shred-and-burn technology.

Covanta Energy owns the facility, officially the SEMASS Resource Recovery Facility. They provide an “energy from waste” solution to trash disposal, or in other words, burning trash for electricity. The company’s Web site notes that it processes about one million tons of solid waste each year — that equates to a fifth of the state’s waste — and the resulting electricity meets the needs of more than 75,000 homes.

Mr. Sedlier weighed his truck in on a scale like the scales Islanders would use to weigh in on at the Oak Bluffs or Edgartown dumps, and then he drove down the road to the incinerator.

The building loomed atop a small hill. It was industrial looking with lots of right angles, beige metal siding and smoke rising from small exhaust pipes.

Mr. Seidler circled the facility on the road that surrounds it, driving to the trash drop-off building. A man Mr. Seidler knows as Robbie motioned for us to stop in front of the entry door to the trash floor.

Robbie wore a bright orange jumpsuit; he’s the air traffic controller of the trash operation. He decides who puts the trash where. He inspects the trash for unacceptable materials (sheetrock, for example). And he coordinates the loader-operators who drive tractors that lift the trash onto conveyor belts that lead into the incinerator.

Robbie motioned for us to enter the trash building. Mr. Sedlier drove through the door. The massive warehouse loomed around us, trash piled 10 feet high across the floor that appeared to be around 100 yards wide and a 100 yards deep, with the ceiling about two or three stories up. The wall of trash sprawled the entire width of the building and filled about half the depth. Mr. Sedlier mentioned that sometimes the room gets to be completely filled with trash.

It was five degrees hotter inside and smelled rank. There was a haze in the air, like you would see in Manhattan looking at buildings 30 blocks away. Birds flew in the rafters not unlike in Grand Central Station. Six tractors with front-loader shovels were working on scooping the trash onto three separate conveyor belts leading into the incinerators.

This operation goes on all day, every day.

The SEMASS facility burns the trash of southeastern Massachusetts, with a capacity for 3,000 tons a day. It is a resource-recovery operation, a recycling operation of sorts, because each ton is burned into about 590 kilowatts of energy. They capture most of the particles before entering the atmosphere, which minimizes the carbon emissions. Burning the trash is thought to be environmentally preferable to a landfill, because at a landfill, greenhouse gasses such as methane are released as the trash deteriorates.

Facilities such as this one offset the carbon footprint from fossil fuels, as every megawatt of electricity produced from burning trash is one less megawatt produced from other means of generating electricity. About 85 per cent of the nation’s energy comes from fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Mr. Sedlier got out of the truck, opened the back door, and started the mechanism that unloads his 20 to 30 tons of Vineyard trash.

The mechanism began its slow process. Imagine metal slats (like floor boards, only skinnier) running long ways at the bottom of the freight container. Every other slat would rise up slightly and move toward the back of the truck, taking the whole load of trash with it. Then they would drop back down and go to their starting position. Then the other half of the slats would raise up and move slightly back, taking all the trash with it, and then drop down and replace. In this way the trash was inched out the back of the truck.

As it slid out Mr. Sedlier said, “It’s a good load today. I’m not going to have to sweep a whole lot.” Sometimes the trash does not slide out of the truck so easily.

The process took around 10 minutes. The truck was in neutral and rolled forward as the trash started piling up behind the back end of the truck and the mechanism continued to push the trash out.

Robbie inspected the load while we waited. The incinerator at SEMASS does not accept sheetrock, cans and bottles and other recyclable materials. Metals are accepted because they separate those materials out to be recycled. The load was approved, so Mr. Sedlier got back in the truck and we drove out into the sunlight.

This is the fate of the trash that we dispose of at the transfer stations on the Vineyard; it is the same fate as most of the trash from across the state. There are, of course, landfills where the trash can go, too. A full 100 per cent of the trash on the Island was going to this incinerator facility until recently, when the different incinerators in the 1988 building entered a period of partial disrepair due to maintenance issues.

There are six transfer stations on Martha’s Vineyard, which are divided into two different organizations. The Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District includes Edgartown, Aquinnah, Chilmark and West Tisbury. All the trash and recycling from the three up-Island towns is brought to the Edgartown transfer station where it is collected and then shipped off-Island.

Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven operate their own system together. The Oak Bluffs transfer station is operated by Bruno’s Rolloff Inc., which is a trash and recycle collection operation as well as a trucking business.

Both organizations do a version of separating the different materials that come in.

At the Oak Bluffs facility on County Road, there are separate concrete bays where different materials such as trash, construction debris, single-stream recyclables (tin cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, newspaper), and sheetrock are placed. Bruno’s offers a lower rate of trash disposal as incentive to people who bring in unused sheetrock. They then sell the sheets to another company, which recycles them for a small profit. The different materials go to different facilities to be dealt with.

In Edgartown, the waste, and construction debris are put on the same floor and then separated by the loader-operator if there is an abundance of wood material. When there is too much wood, they load a separate truck that takes it to a different facility that deals with wood. Edgartown’s transfer station has separate containers for the other recyclables such as plastics and colored glass, tin, clear glass, cardboard and newspapers. They do not accept sheetrock.

Often seasonal renters do not bother to recycle, instead putting everything in trash bags.

“Those are the ones that don’t seem to do much recycling or have the incentive to,” said Don Hatch, director of the Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District. “If you’re renting a house for a week, it doesn’t seem to be separated at that point. Everything is all in the trash bag when it comes in here, cans, bottles, papers, cardboard.”

At the Edgartown facility workers in a central cabin watch people coming in to make sure that materials are going in the proper places. But it is hard to catch it when recyclable materials are in black plastic bags, Mr. Hatch said.

At Oak Bluffs, Bruno’s is working on educating the people who go there about recycling and proper disposal. Workers are always on hand during dump hours to aid people in putting materials in the proper piles and to have conversations about the different systems, such as single-stream recycling, which the company has been presenting as an easier alternative to separating recyclable materials. They also have pamphlets detailing what is and is not recyclable.

The general trend of the Island in recent years is toward more recycling.

Driving back to Woods Hole, having deposited another load of trash, Mr. Sedlier said: “I’ve seen the change in the way the companies do business, the way they have come full circle in terms of being conscious about recycling. And that’s the way the industry is going and everybody has complied with it, and that’s amazing. It’s amazing to see how quick everything has evolved.

“People don’t have to think about it anymore,” he said. “They just do it.”

This article has been changed online from the original to correct the misspelling of a name.