Westville’s getting the first new toters. Meanwhile, people across New Haven can now recycle household waste without sorting it first.
Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts detailed those two developments in New Haven’s evolving approach to recycling in an interview at the dawn of a new fiscal year.
The city had been waiting until July 1, the first day of the new fiscal year, to get moving on one part a plan to reform the way the city recycles.
The big plan is to downsize residents’ regular trash bins, and upsize their recycling bins, to encourage more recycling — and save the city money. The master plan will be phased in piece by piece, Smuts said.
The first piece fell into place last week, when the city awarded a contract to Toter Incorporated. The company will manufacture 6,000 brown, 48-gallon trash bins and send them to New Haven, where they’ll be rolled out to households in the first pilot neighborhood, Westville. The new bins will be paid for by a quarter-million-dollar line item in the mayor’s capital budget.
The new bins should hit Westville doorsteps by late August or early September, Smuts said. Everyone on the Monday trash route will get one. Those residents will throw their regular trash in the new, brown bins. They’ll slap a recycling sticker on their current, bigger 96-gallon blue bins and start using them for recycling instead of regular trash. That simple toter switcheroo has been shown to improve recycling rates in other towns by 50 to 80 percent, Smuts said.
The plan aims to save the city money: Every ton of recyclable waste that’s diverted from trash can to recycling bin saves the city $105, according to Smuts. That’s because the city pays to get its garbage removed, but gets paid for recycling.
Westville was selected for the pilot plan because it has the highest recycling rate in the city, and because the Monday trash route has the lowest volume of the five pickup days.
When Westvillians start throwing more recyclables into their bigger bins, the city will track the savings. The city will then extend the program to other neighborhoods, using the new revenue from recycling to pay for more toters. The timeline for the expansion will depend on the magnitude of the savings, Smuts said.
“No More Sorting”
Meanwhile, the city has begun getting the word out about a new “single-stream” recycling program that makes recycling easier for everyone across the city. Under the single-stream program, New Haveners no longer have to sort any recyclables. Everything — paper, plastic, metal, bottles — can be mixed in together in a recycling bin.
“Throw it all in,” Smuts said.
The new system was quietly rolled out at the end of last year with no fanfare. Since the end of 2009, city recyclables are sent to a single-stream plant in Willimantic. The recyclables are sorted there using conveyor belts, optical scanners and some manual labor. Click on the video at the top of this story for a video by RecycleBank explaining how single-stream works in general.
Click here for a report by New Haven’s Office of Sustainability about a field trip to Willimantic Waste.
The city was going to use RecycleBank to undertake and publicize its recycling reforms, but the deal fell apart when RecycleBank couldn’t strike a deal with Toter.
After that deal fizzled, the city took on the task of getting the word out. The Office of Sustainability posted a new flyer on its website announcing new rules for what people can recycle. Click here to read it.
City of New Haven
“No More Sorting!” the flyer boasts. It gives a breakdown of what you can and cannot recycle.
The flyer also tells residents where to throw their trash.
For most people in the city, the bins haven’t changed. People should throw trash in the big blue bin, and throw recycling in the smaller, 16-gallon bin.
Smuts said the city waited so long to announce the single-stream program because it wanted to save its efforts for a comprehensive public information campaign that would include news about the toter changes, too.
He said the system has several advantages.
“It’s much easier for people to recycle” with single-stream, so it should encourage more recycling, he said.
And once people start using the bigger bins for recycling, it will make life easier for the city’s public works crews. They’ll be able to pick up the recycling with an automated arm, rather than stoop over to pick up little bins and haul them into the truck.
“It’s quicker for us to do,” Smuts said — and may lead to fewer workmen’s compensation claims from injuries on the job.
Anyone with questions about the new recycling rules can call the Office of Sustainability at (203) 946‑7905.
There are good ideas involved that may be negated because of the implementation plans. Unfortunately, this article is largely a press release for the city and fails to raise potential issues that have been noted in previous stories on this subject. The concerns center around the impact of the smaller trash containers and include:
<i>The big plan is to downsize residents' regular trash bins, and upsize their recycling bins, to encourage more recycling—and save the city money. The master plan will be phased in piece by piece, Smuts said.</i>
The new bins should have been designated as recycling bins. They are larger and better (covered) than the current bins, which would already encourage more use.
<i>...That simple toter switcheroo has been shown to improve recycling rates in other towns by 50 to 80 percent, Smuts said. </i>
From where is Mr. Smuts obtaining this data? What are the parameters of the study involved?
There are multiple factors at work in such a plan:
To claim that the third factor is relevant would require examples of programs that changed other factors and experienced different results. I believe that the city could realize most or all of the benefits desired, and avoid the potential concerns, by changing the implementation details and assigning the new containers to be for recycling.