Decades of Dedication: Marc Morgan Leads with Purpose at NCES Landfill

Marc Morgan realized early on he wanted a career in waste management.

“My motivation has always been caring for creation and taking care of the natural world. And when I was in college, I can remember being asked: What do you want to do? What's your career path? And I was uncertain and ended up doing a work study job assisting the management of the college recycling program,” he says.

That has led to a nearly 30-year career in waste management.

“My whole life has been garbage,” he says.

Most recently, Morgan is a division manager overseeing the North Country Environmental Services landfill in Bethlehem. Before that, he was Casella’s strategic account manager in eastern Connecticut, where the company operates several facilities. He is one of nearly 300 Casella employees in New Hampshire who manage 537,300 tons of solid waste, recyclables, and organics.

When it came time to work in the private sector, he says Casella “was the only company I was looking at. Casella reflected a lot of my own personal philosophies. It runs through the company — our recycling group, the solutions group. To have that as part of the corporate philosophy just made a lot of sense to me.”

Recycling and reuse have been the focus of Morgan’s work since the beginning.

Before graduating from Keene State College in 1997 with a degree in environmental policy, he did an internship with the City of Keene. His senior thesis devised contract language focused on waste diversion, addressing a wide-scale demolition project underway in Keene. He also worked part-time at the town of Chesterfield’s transfer station.

After college, he worked in the public sector — for Westchester County in New York, Lebanon, N.H., and the state of New Hampshire — in waste management and recycling planning.

“Solid waste and recycling represented a very tangible way to have an impact on the natural world. It was something that you could see — managing waste at a landfill and doing that properly, having that as a backdrop to taking care of the environment,” he says.

For a while, he was one of the State of New Hampshire's solid
waste planners.

“My position was the recycling coordinator for the state, and I did technical assistance across the state with municipalities and businesses on how to divert more material from the waste stream and how to do it properly,” he says.

Returning to New Hampshire to work with Casella in 2024 was like coming home for Morgan.

“Connecticut was fantastic. I worked with some amazing people there. I met some great people doing good work there,” he says. “But I'm really, really glad to be home here in New Hampshire.”

Much of his current work is waste diversion — identifying those waste streams that would otherwise take up precious space in the landfill.

When it comes to the needs for disposal versus the needs of protecting the environment, Morgan says, “Casella provides that kind of pathway.”

“As a company, early on, we were really focused on waste diversion, recognizing that, if we pull this out, the hole lasts longer,” he adds. “For me, it's an obvious balance of waste diversion and the need for disposal.”

He credits the state for its emphasis on recycling.

“I've been in New Hampshire for a long time, and I think New Hampshire does a pretty good job. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely, there's always room for improvement,” he says. “There are programs that we've set up that are either no additional cost or a savings. There's a lot of opportunity available for communities and businesses to divert more material."

He lauds the Granite State's cooperative nature among the various entities that a waste management system encompasses: the state, the municipalities, the policymakers, and the consumers.

“Everything New Hampshire has accomplished has been through collaboration,” he says. “For New Hampshire to reach its stated goals, it will take continued collaboration of industry professionals, policy makers, and consumers moving in the same direction.”