Pay as you throw garbage idea returns

SALISBURY — The idea of a “pay as you throw” fee system resurfaced at the Wednesday, Jan. 16, meeting of the Salisbury-Sharon Transfer Station Recycling and Advisory Committee (TRAC) at Town Hall in Sharon.Jennifer Weymouth from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection attended and gave a presentation on “SMART,” which stands for “Save Money and Recycle More Trash.”TRAC member Bob Palmer opened the meeting by thanking the 30 or so people for attending, noting that garbage is not “a glamorous issue.”“You don’t see garbage trucks in parades,” he said wryly.He said the Salisbury-Sharon Transfer Station is a stand-alone agency with a $900,000 budget; that residents of the two towns receive “a significantly higher level of service” than at other transfer stations; and that the transfer station depends on revenues (especially from the sale of recyclables such as metal and paper) and local property taxes, and not state or federal subsidies.Palmer noted that the transfer station is now selling recyclables, so it is more important than ever to improve recycling rates.Throwing away recyclable materials “is like throwing money in the hopper.”Change in lifestyleWeymouth began her presentation by noting that the state’s recycling rate has been steady at 24 percent for several years, which is less than half of the goal of 58 percent by 2024.She said promoting a unit-based fee schedule (that is, a program such as SMART or pay-as-you-throw or PAYT), can be a tough sell to residents used to a yearly sticker free (which is $80 in Salisbury and Sharon).The idea is that recycling rates rise when residents are charged by the bag for their garbage, because they make more of an effort to separate the recyclable materials (they are only charged for the garbage that goes into the general trash hopper).Weymouth said one approach is to appeal to those concerned about the environment: more recycling saves resources and energy, and reduces greenhouse gases.She said that there is also an “economic value in waste reduction” — lower disposal costs and more recycling mean, ultimately, lower property taxes.But getting people to buy into the idea means convincing them to change their behavior — not only in terms of disposal but also in the way they shop. They need not only to be more vigilant about how they throw things away; they also need to buy fewer things they don’t need, and to buy items in bulk so there is less packaging.She said one goal is to convince people “to treat trash like a utility.”“Trash is not free,” she said, adding that “It’s harder to control costs when they are hidden in the tax base.”Weymouth said that when PAYT was introduced in some parts of Massachusetts in 2005, the participating towns produced an average of 512 pounds of trash per person. The towns that stayed with the old system produced an average of 902 pounds per person.She said that 30 towns in Connecticut use some form of unit-based pricing, and that Stonington claims savings of $5 million since 1995 thanks to the program.But it’s still hard to convince residents to change.Columbia, Conn., tried a six-month PAYT trial period recently. Weymouth said that the amount of trash brought in for disposal was almost cut in half during the trial, with a corresponding increase in recycling — but after the six months were up the town voted to go back to their old system.About $2 per bagEvery town decides how it will charge in a PAYT program; many towns sell the garbage bags, rather than tallying the bags as they are thrown in the trash. Weymouth said the average cost for a 30-gallon bag is $2.Salisbury First Selectman Curtis Rand asked what Salisbury-Sharon would have to charge per bag to generate the same revenue as the $80 sticker fee.Transfer station manager Brian Bartram said, “off the top of my head,” that to replace the approximately $300,000 in user fees (from stickers and businesses) the transfer station would have to charge about $2 per bag — the same as the average price Weymouth cited.Weymouth recommended offering three different size bags; reducing or eliminating the annual sticker fee; and sending a message to residents: “You control what you pay.”Rand said to make a convincing case for switching fee systems “we have to be able to say what it means to a household.” To that end he suggested a study by an independent group.Switching to a PAYT program was last discussed in the winter of 2010, when a company called WasteZero gave several presentations in Salisbury and Sharon, but the idea was not popular with voters in the two towns.