The Westbrook City Council, sitting as Committee of the Whole on Feb. 22, again took up the issue of recycling trash. Having spoken to the council on many occasions during the past two years about this, and it was heartening to me that the issue of whether Westbrook should be recycling residential waste seems to be a settled question. The question seems to be how to do it. It is disheartening, though, that some councilors (and the Mayor) seem to have drawn a line in the sand and have endorsed one approach, and refuse to consider the alternative. The net outcome if this does not change is that Westbrook will continue to be the only municipality in the greater Portland area that does not recycle its waste.
In my opinion, every one of us ought to be embarrassed by this. We are currently recycling a pathetic 6 percent of our residential waste volume. Our neighbors in Gorham, Windham, Portland, South Portland, Falmouth, Standish, and Cumberland are on average recycling over 35 percent of their waste. If our recycling rates were similar to those of our neighbors, we would be recycling at least 5 million pounds of trash into products that could be reused, save on tipping fees at Regional Waste Systems, and reducing the amounts of smoke released into the air and the amount of toxic ashes generated by burning.
There are two approaches currently being discussed. One is the approach Saco uses, which requires that the city buy new trucks and buy one 60 gallon trash can for every household, as well as containers to hold recycled goods. People can throw away one barrel’s worth of trash every week. This would presumably force people who have lots of trash to put bottles, cans, and newspapers into the recycling bin, so they can put only non-recycleable trash into the waste containers.
It works in Saco, as evidenced by the 35 percent recycling rate they have there. One defect of this approach is that small families, elderly people, and single people, who generate less than 60 gallons of trash each week, wouldn’t have any financial reason to recycle. Politically, this is an easier solution, though, because the $1.5 million cost of the program can be bonded over 10 years, and represent only a slight increase over current costs of trash collection, about $16,000 per year. This is a very modest cost that accomplishes an important goal. It has the liability of tying us down to one way of doing things for the next decade, though, because the cost is bonded over that time. Interesting, innovative approaches to recycling are being evolved every day, and our ability to adopt state-of-the-art approaches will be limited by this substantial investment over a decade.
The other approach is pay as you throw, or pay-per-bag recycling, which is much simpler. You would buy your bags at Shaw’s, Shop and Save, or at the local hardware store for a fee that the council would agree upon, maybe 75 cents per bag. You would get recycling containers from the city, and you would put your recyclables and designated bags at curbside, where they would be picked up every week.
Most of our neighboring communities do it this way. This appears to be politically more difficult to because the costs are in the open, and people deal with them on a weekly basis. It has the advantage of making people think about every single thing they throw away, because we have to pay for the bags to dispose it in. It also has the advantage of being easy to implement, and easy to discontinue if we choose to go in a different direction. And while a small group of councilors object, they cannot credibly say that pay-per-bag recycling doesn’t work. The evidence is overwhelming that pay-per-bag programs work. They are in hundreds of communities around the state, and once introduced are kept in place virtually 100 percent of the time.
We cannot continue to foul our nests by continuing to carelessly toss our trash away. Many of us apparently tell our councilors that we already recycle, and that we resent being forced to pay to do something that we already do.
The hard reality is that a tiny minority of us actually do this (witness our 6 percent recycling rate), and the experience of thousands of communities around the country tells us that most of us just won’t recycle unless it is both convenient and unless it costs us something not to. Our current practice of allowing our citizens to throw away and burn stuff that, in the millions of pounds, could be recycled, is environmentally irresponsible, and is not what mature adults ought to let happen. Whichever approach we take, we need to move off the dime and do something effective.
I look to the Westbrook Council to bridge differences and make recycling actually happen this year.
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