FREEPORT

Sometimes a bit of color can make all the difference.

The town’s newest “silver bullet” recycling location on Hunter Road, above the public works garage, currently features a container decorated by local artist Sebastian Meade.

Meade, 33, was born and raised in Freeport and attended art school at Ripon College in Wisconsin. He spent two months last summer covering the container with whimsical likenesses of big-toothed critters consuming one another’s tails in a fanciful version of the Ouroboros, the ancient image of a snake eating its own tail. 

The ancient image, of course, symbolizes renewal and cycles of repetition.

It’s heady stuff. But Meade said he didn’t overthink the idea.

Rather, “I always just liked painting monsters and robots and goofiness,” he said.

In fact, he got the painting gig by winning a decoration contest in spring 2012, after being chased off Main Street by police the previous winter, where he’d decorated numerous trash cans with chalk versions of similar monsters. The cans looked beat-up, so he decided to make them prettier and more colorful. 

“It wasn’t the police’s fault,” Meade said. “Someone complained that it was going on, and the police came by and told me to stop.”

Shortly afterward he submitted his designs to EcoMaine, the Portland-based company that owns and maintains the recycling containers in 25 communities. EcoMaine administrators liked what they saw, and dropped a container in Meade’s driveway. Two months later, it was retrieved again — by now all sparkling and colorful — and put into municipal rotation.

It arrived in Freeport in December; because they continuously are moved throughout EcoMaine’s coverage area, it may be a while before Freeport sees this container again.

“Single-stream recycling has made it much easier for people to reduce the trash they generate,” said Sandy Thompson, chairwoman of Freeport’s Recycling Committee. “We’re trying to get people to rethink how they dispose of what they bring home.”

It is working: Town recycling rates have increased from 28.5 percent in 2009 to 33.1 percent in 2012, according to recycling facility manager Suzanne Duplissis.

Containers also are located at the Village Store on South Freeport Road, behind the public safety building on West Street, at Doherty’s Store on Wardtown Road and at the transfer and recycling station on Hedgehog Mountain Road.