Rob Smuts will watch to see which neighborhoods recycle the most curbside trash over the next 16 weeks. The winner gets a prize: The chance to upgrade to spacious new bins and join the city’s new approach to putting out the garbage.
Smuts (pictured), the city’s chief administrative officer and top trash-overseer, announced details of the contest in a curbside conversation Thursday outside the McKinley Avenue home of Westville Alderman Greg Dildine.
In mid-August, Dildine and his neighbors, as well as everyone else who gets their picked up on Mondays, found new, 48-gallon brown bins on the curbs outside their homes. The delivery came with instructions: Use the new bins for trash, and start using the old, 96-gallon blue trash bins for recycling instead.
$83K In Savings
In just a month and a half, the changeup has shown dramatic results, Smuts announced. The recycling rate for the Monday route, which includes Westville and parts of West Hills and Beaver Hills, more than doubled, from 11 percent to 28 percent. That’s the percent of recycled goods compared to the total curbside refuse in those neighborhoods.
The city rolled out the new system to try to reverse a steep decline in trash recycling.
Meanwhile, the city also switched this year to single-stream recycling, meaning that residents no longer have to sort their recyclables. (Click here for a list of recyclable materials.)
Dildine (pictured) said the switch was easy: Instead of using small recycling bins, which were one-third of the size of the new ones, and separating newspapers from white paper from cans and bottles, he now dumps all his recycling into the big blue toter. The best part, he said, is that you no longer have to cut your cardboard into smaller pieces, because it can fit in the big bin.
Click on the play arrow to watch Smuts explain the new rules.
The simple switcheroo is projected to save the city $103,000 per year, Smuts calculated. If you subtract the cost of the new toters, which was $20,000, there’s a net projected savings of $83,000, just from the homes that changed their toters. That’s because the city pays to haul away trash, but gets paid for recycling tonnage.
Westville was chosen to debut the new program because the Monday route had the highest recycling rate, Smuts said. It’s also geographically farthest from the trash transfer center on Middletown Avenue. Because Westville now produces less trash, the city is already saving one extra truck trip per week to the transfer center, which saves about an hour of trash-hauler’s time, he said.
If other neighborhoods follow suit in increasing recycling by 150 percent, that could save the city half a million dollars per year, Smuts calculated.
Now he’s is posing the challenge to other neighborhoods to follow Westville’s lead.
The Contest
The challenge goes out to other neighborhoods that haven’t yet received the new toters. Whichever group shows the highest recycling rate by the end of January will receive new toters in March, Smuts said.
In the contest, neighborhoods are split up into four teams. The teams mirror the four trash routes, with pickup days on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Team Tuesday: East Rock’s Ward 9, Wooster Square, Prospect Hill, Dixwell, Newhallville, part of Beaver Hill
Team Wednesday: The Hill, West River, Dwight
Team Thursday: (most of) East Rock’s Ward 10, Fair Haven, Quinnipiac Meadows
Team Friday: East Shore, Fair Haven Heights
To find out which route you belong to, click here for a map, or use the city’s lookup tool.
Throughout the duration of the contest, Oct. 18 to Jan. 28, the city’s Office of Sustainability will be posting status updates here.
The city also accepts electronic waste, including old computers, at its recycling center on Middletown Avenue. Click here for the hours.
Winners of the contest should get new toters in March. After that, the rest of the toters will be rolled out, route by route, in August 2010, March 2011, and August 2011, Smuts said.
Back in Westville, Alderman Dildine said the recycling program is going well in general. He said he has heard from some landlords that transient renters are not catching on to the recycling program.
“For some reason, some renters do not seem as inclined to recycle,” he said.
As other neighborhoods compete for the toters, the city is seeking ways to boost Westville’s rate even higher.
The goal, he said, is “as high as it will go.”
If they realized an $80k+ savings in just Westville, why on earth wouldn't they just roll this out in all neighborhoods ASAP?