Melissa Bailey Photo
Should Westvillers throw dirty Kleenex into their big blue bins this weekend?
Those and other questions arose at a community meeting about a new way of throwing out household garbage that debuts Monday in Westville and will soon to spread through the whole city — potentially putting New Haven back on the cost-saving recycling track.
The new system has people using their blue 96-gallon toters — currently used for regular household trash — for all their recycling instead, the stuff that currently goes into small blue bins. And no more sorting newspapers from household papers from tin cans. It all goes into the toters together. That’s called “single stream.”
All other garbage — the non-recyclable stuff — will go into 48-gallon brown bins being delivered to Westville households. Click here for a full story about that.
That change begins to take effect with Monday’s trash pick-up, just in Westville, with the delivery of the new brown bins there. The city expects to roll out the system to the rest of the city over the next few years.
Anticipating confusion, officials discussed the new approach at a Wednesday night meeting of the West Hills management team.
Melinda Tuhus Photo
That’s where Catherine Gootkin (pictured) asked her question about the dirty Kleenex.
Gootkin assumed the answer was yes, throwing the Kleenex in the recycling toter will ruin the stream.
But city Public Works Director John Prokop assured her that used tissues and paper towels can safely be chucked — along with a surprising array of other disposables — into the huge blue bins.
The blue bins will be slapped with a sticker (shown by Prokop) in Spanish and English showing their purpose. The brown bins will be clearly labeled, “Trash Only.”
All kinds of paper, glass jars, metal cans, plastics labeled with recycling numbers 1 through 7, and other acceptable items (click here for a complete list what to recycle and not to recycle) should go in the recycling bins, Prokop said. Not much else will remain to go out in the trash — mostly food items and grease-contaminated things like pizza box bottoms.
Management team member Andy Orefice suggested if — in this pizza-crazy town — shop owners could be persuaded to line the box bottoms with waxed paper, thousands of cardboard bottoms could be rescued from the trash each year and sent to recycling, he said.
“Anything is possible,” Prokop responded. “You work with us and we’ll work with you,” he said.
But bottom line, once the program is fully rolled out, residents will be fined if they don’t participate.
Prokop said other cities have upped their recycling rate by 30 percent by introducing single-stream. New Haven currently is recycling a mere 10 percent of its trash, despite a state mandate in effect for years requiring that 25 percent of municipal trash be recycled. That mandate rises to 52 percent by 2024.
Potential savings loom. It now costs the city $87.50 a ton to dispose of its 45,000 tons of garbage annually, mostly at incinerators elsewhere in the state, with a smaller amount going to a landfill in New York State. The city will be paid $28 a ton for the recyclables it sends to Willimantic Waste and Paper in that Connecticut town. That’s a $116 swing in the form of taxpayer savings.
“As a team,” Prokop said, “if we do this, we are going to cut the city’s budget by a million dollars on the public works side.”
The city’s sustainability director, Christine Eppstein-Tang (pictured), said after the meeting that most of the sorting is automated, but some is done by manual labor. “That’s why it’s also very important to have the recyclable materials not be contaminated with foods and grease, because the odor is really a problem.”
What about composting? “We’ve heard from restaurants downtown and several members of the Board of Aldermen that it’s something we need to pay attention to,” Eppstein-Tang said. “So we’re encouraging people to compost in their back yards. We have compost bins available for free.” They can be requested by calling 203 – 946-7700.
Members of the volunteer group New Haven Master Recyclers will help the city spread the word about the new system at management team meetings around the city.
Have these bins been dropped off in Westville todavia? As today is Thurs, my big blue is already 1/2 full with a week and a half of trash.
Can we get a list of streets they plan to reward?