“Not bad for a kid from Lynn.”

Nathan Gray smiles to himself after he says this, standing in the driveway of his home, the endpoint of a winding uphill climb in the heart of Barrington. His house is flanked by some unorthodox structures, including a large trailer housing several recycle bins and a tiny house that appears to be built with some sort of rainbow-flecked unknown material. Unknown to the casual observer, however, these edifices represent as green an endeavor as you can get.

“A few years ago, I was just a typical dad and builder from Lynn, Massachusetts,” Nathan recounts. “Then I saw the need to switch over to use more sustainable products, which also reflected the desire and the passion of my clients.”

That eco-friendly pivot gave birth to a true lightbulb moment: why not lean into the recyclable game and create a new business?

The playbook was straightforward: “We go to local businesses and collect their hard to recycle plastic that would end up in a landfill or an incinerator or maybe even the environment,” Nathan says “We take that plastic waste and turn it into products that they’re purchasing like accent walls or tables or picnic benches. These products can then be shredded down again and recycled.”

And his company, Plastic Recycled, was born. Sure, the recycle loop isn’t ad infinitum (Nathan figures the same batch of plastic waste can be recycled seven times), but squeezing multiple uses out of what once was a single-use disposable material is about as win/win/win as it gets: a unique, viable business model for a local entrepreneur + cost savings and clear consciences for companies + a windfall benefit to the environment.

That sustainability ethos doesn’t stop at Nathan’s driveway; thanks to a collaboration with SELT and Rochester Water Works, a pair of win/win homerun conservation easements came into being.

“This property represents a critical piece of the drinking water protection puzzle our friends and partners in Rochester continue to assemble,” says Kaitlin Deyo, SELT’s Conservation Project Manager. “The Gray family’s decision to protect their land will have far-reaching benefits for both wildlife and human communities for generations.”

The Gray property resides just uphill from the Rochester Reservoir in Barrington. The City’s goals were twofold: 1) to remove the threat of future development near their drinking water supply, and 2) to acquire a small but important section of critical water supply infrastructure, a supply pipe running through the beaver pond at the Grays’ property entrance.

Through this transaction, the Grays and City of Rochester exchanged land, with the city obtaining the parcel where the supply pipe runs, and the Grays acquiring more land near their home. And both parties conveyed conservation easements to SELT, expanding the protection along the reservoir.

“It’s really important to the whole watershed,” Nathan says. “So, anything that we do up here affects the water quality and we are aware of that.”

The natural resource inventory of the Gray property reads like a conservation greatest hits album. The land slots into a 1,843 acre unfragmented forest block allowing for increased wildlife transit and habitat creation, sits entirely within the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (DES) high priority water supply lands and Rochester Water Department’s Source Water Protection Area, and features over 42 acres of habitat significantly ranked in the State of NH Wildlife Action Plan. Also: the land is easy on the eyes.

“It’s really important to the whole watershed,” Nathan says. “So, anything that we do up here affects the water quality and we are aware of that.”

“Whenever anyone comes here, they always talk about how euphoric or how idyllic this land is,” Nathan says. “It’s that woodland setting that always puts smiles on people’s faces.”

The Gray conservation is another success story in the ongoing SELT/Rochester partnership that has to date yielded nearly conserved 600 acres of high priority water supply lands, providing over 25,000 residents with clean water from the tap.

Meanwhile, now, on a beautiful New Hampshire day, Nathan stretches out on his plastic bench, watching his young children play in the open, now-conserved sunlit field. He takes the moment to relax before heading out to collect another load of plastic to turn into something else, something new, something useful.

The (re)cycle continues.