A recent Portland Press Herald article recently spoke of a statewide goal of recycling 50 percent of residential waste, a goal that has been in place for the past decade.
It also spoke of work that is being done on the next generation of recycling, through composting of food waste. It is believed that if folks composted their food waste, we could realistically set as a goal the recycling of 75 percent of household waste. The article pointed out work that cities throughout Maine are doing in selling composting bins to consumers at reduced rates, and teaching people to compost.
This is heartening information. Except for one thing.
Consider Westbrook’s recycling efforts.
Forget the comparison against the state goal of 50 percent recycling
Forget the comparisons with our sister cities and towns – Portland, Falmouth, Cumberland, Gorham, Windham – that have long-established pay-per-bag recycling programs. And that 135 other cities and towns in Maine all have recycling rates in the 30-40 percent range.
Forget the comparison with the three cities that do curbside recycling coupled with automated trash pickup – South Portland, Scarborough and Saco. Their recycling rates hover around 20 percent.
Westbrook’s last reported recycling rate was 6 percent. Single-stream recycling might bump it to 8 or 9 percent.
We should all be embarrassed.
Five years of city councilors and the mayor all claiming that recycling is a high priority is powerfully contradicted by their failure as a group to do anything.
We should all be embarrassed.
There is, in my view, unreasonable council opposition to pay- per-bag recycling. It has been shown to work in 140 communities in Maine. It generates the highest volume of recycling of any mode of recycling. Start-up costs are negligible. And it puts responsibility for recycling where it belongs, with the person who generates the waste.
However unreasonable this opposition is, opposition is a reality.
If we accept that the council majority is strongly (if unreasonably) opposed to pay-per-bag recycling, far better than doing nothing is the approach that three other communities in Maine use, which is to pair curbside recycling with automated trash pickup. That approach, which historically generates a 20 percent recycling rate, may be more effective with Saco’s approach. Saco has begun issuing 32-gallon waste receptacles, and much larger recycling bins. The community requires that anybody who has waste that does not fit in the 32-gallon barrel pays extra for disposal. This action provides some small incentive to recycle that is otherwise absent from these types of programs. We can anticipate with this innovation that this type of program can generate 25 percent recycling.
Westbrook stands virtually alone among the cities of southern Maine in having a singularly ineffective recycling program. We annually generate 15 million pounds of trash. We burn more than 14 million pounds of trash, much of which can be profitably reused and recycled.
Do the citizens of Westbrook care that our environmental record in this area is awful? Does the City Council care?
Where is the embarrassment? More to the point, where is the action?
To the City Council: It is good that City Hall has begun recycling, as well as the school department and Westbrook Housing. But in curbside recycling with our citizens, where 98 percent of our trash is generated, we are doing almost nothing.
Promises that “we’ll do it next year” are hollow. We have heard them five years in a row. Comments that “this is a bad year” are meaningless. It is always a bad year. Announcements that we need further study are without warrant. The State Planning Office pronounced the Recycling Task Force’s report from last year as the best it has ever seen from a citizen group. Further study is an unacceptable excuse for continued inaction.
We need action.
Michael Miles is a Westbrook resident and member of the Recycling Task Force.
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