With Permission
Santa Claus is coming to town, but what of the piles of festive wrapping paper, cards and paperboard boxes that households the portly gentleman visits accrue?
Etta Jane Hanlon, a 15-year-old sophomore at Branford High School, has an up-to-date solution for this problem of Yuletide seasons present and past: recycling holiday wrapping paper. Within a short period, her idea has become a town reality. Its first real test comes this holiday season.
For the inaugural year of the program, the town has ordered 4,000 stickers and bags for distribution in the middle and elementary schools and at various public places — the community center, the senior center, Town Hall, the transfer station and Blackstone Memorial Library — throughout the town.
According to Hanlon, several businesses and churches in town have expressed an interest in using the bags.
An Idea Takes Shape
Each year within her own family, Hanlon said, she noticed that a lot of holiday paper remained after the family had unwrapped the “mound of presents” underneath its Christmas tree.
“We threw it into a plastic bag and placed it out on the curb,” she said of the paper the family discarded as trash. “I always wondered why we didn’t recycle it.
“I thought, ‘Why not?’” she said of recycling holiday paper products. There is a big difference between trash, which the town pays to incinerate, and recyclables, which the town sells for cash.
“I brought the idea to my father,” she said. As a member of the Representative Town Meeting, her father Doug serves on the Public Services Committee to which Branford’s Solid Waste and Recycling Center reports. “He thought it was a great idea,” she said.
Her father spoke with Dan McGowan, the supervisor of Branford’s Solid Waste and Recycling Center, who, she said, also loved the idea.
“I think it’s fantastic,” McGowan said last Friday afternoon of the effort, which has now emerged as the Branford Holiday Paper Recycling Program. The program, McGowan said, is the first of its kind in the state.
“I think the majority of the town doesn’t look at holiday wrapping paper as a recycling product and it ends up being thrown in the trash,” McGowan said. “This is to raise awareness that this isn’t ordinary trash.”
A New Recycling Bag Is Born
To implement the program, Hanlon and McGowan designed a holiday recycling sticker to appear on a fluorescent green background detailing what can and cannot go into the holiday recycling bag. The bag is a 30-gallon paper bag — the same size the town uses for leaf collection.
The fluorescent green color, according to McGowan, will make it easy for those who pick up the trash to spot a holiday recycling bag on a curb.
McGowan said over the years he has noticed a 40-ton bump in the trash Branford generates over the holidays. He said a large chunk of that comes from holiday wrapping paper and also the paper gift boxes, paper tissue, packaging and the other paper products the season brings.
Here are the rules, including no ribbons or bows in the environmental bag.
Trash, he noted, goes to an incinerator, and the town pays for that. The town sells its recyclables.
In November, according to McGowan, the market price for each ton of recycled paper waste approached $40. The town sells its recyclable paper products to the Stratford Baling Corp. in Stratford.
“The town could definitely benefit from this program,” Hanlon said. Yet, she emphasized, “This really is a program that depends upon community involvement.”
“It streamlines so nicely into everything we do,” McGowan said.
In a town of more than 10,000 housing units, Hanlon said she and McGowan chose to distribute 4,000 bags with stickers because this is the program’s inaugural year.
“It is a pilot program so we didn’t want to order too many,” Hanlon said. “We knew that bags would be going to schoolchildren in elementary and middle schools. That’s around 1,600. The rest can go around the town.”
Hanlon and McGowan plan to distribute the bags in stacks to drop-off points by the end of the week, with the two now recruiting volunteers to place the stickers on the bags. Etta Hanlon said she hoped to receive assistance from members of her school’s student council, with McGowan, she said, gathering volunteers from the community.
“This is something that isn’t very expensive for the town,” said McGowan, noting that contracts for components of the program were already in place. “We did talk to the RTM, and I talked to my Solid Waste Commission and spoke with the first selectman at the time.”
File Photo
When, in September, Hanlon made her presentation to the Representative Town Meeting (RTM), the town’s legislative body voted unanimously to “commend and recommend” the idea.
McGowan emphasized that the paperboard the program seeks to bag among its holiday recyclables is not the corrugated cardboard that the town recycles all year. “It’s paperboard, like Cracker Jack boxes,” he said. “This bag isn’t designed for that [corrugated] cardboard.”
Hanlon noted that her family, which, in addition to her parents, includes her younger brother Eli, has become more adept at recycling. She recalls a time when her family placed one bin of recyclables and three of trash for pick-up on the curb.
Today, she said those numbers are reversed.
She said others support the Holiday Paper Recycling Program.
“A lot of people are interested in this project. They support it,” she said. “People really do need a way to recycle Christmas trash instead of throwing it out.”
Future Expansion
And both McGowan and Hanlon see possibilities for expansion of the program within Branford and beyond in the years to come.
“We could get students to design bags,” said McGowan, remarking that art students in Branford could hold a contest. He observed that not only do students come from households that generate the most holiday paper but also that the younger generation is “more inclined to be excited about a recycling program.”
He said that, if Branford can save the environment from 40 tons of trash at holiday time, “Who knows what that translates to across the state?”
According to the California-based group, Conservatree.org, paper industry representatives have estimated that one ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees.
The town has an opportunity, McGowan said, “to get this program up and running and introduce it to the rest of the towns in the state.”
Hanlon said she would be willing to go to other towns and make presentations about the program.
“Maybe they’ll even come to me about it,” she said. “I hope that they [other towns] will decide to implement it, too.”
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This is a wonderful idea. I hope that other towns, like the City of New Haven can pick up on this. Great idea coming from Etta - you have a bright future ahead of you!!!!