Back to Recycling "In The News"
By Rachel Stamieszkin (04/14/2007)
The total 2007 estimated Cape Elizabeth town budget is estimated at $8.3 million. (To review the budget visit the town Web site at www.capeelizabeth.com) Excluding debt service, employee benefits, and other non-distributed items, the remaining $6.3 million is shown on the graph, at right. Refuse disposal comes in at $807,000 or 13 percent of the town expenses – on par with the cost of our police department. With the already high and still increasing costs of refuse disposal, towns in Southern Maine are looking for ways to increase recycling rates to reduce the town tax burden associated with refuse disposal.
Many Southern Maine towns are using a variety of “incentives” to help focus people on recycling their regular household waste, waste that normally either goes into the incineration hopper or the silver bullets such as paper, paper board, plastics, cans and glass. In a recent interview with EcoMaine’s Recycling Coordinator, Missi Labbe, I asked what combination of these incentives is most successful. Labbe responded that when curbside pickup is combined with pay-per-bag for “trash,” towns’ recycling rates go up by about 50 percent.
The towns in our area with the top recycling rates for household waste are Gorham, Falmouth, Windham and Cumberland. Their recycling rates for these items hover in the 30 percent-plus range, and all pay-per-bag and curbside pickup, although in Falmouth, residents who opt for curbside pay a premium for it, so people still have an excuse to go to their transfer station to socialize.
Unfortunately, Cape Elizabeth only averages around 16 percent*. To state it in other terms, in the last fiscal year, of the 4,419 tons of the household refuse we Cape Elizabethians took to the Recycling Center, only 696 tons went into the “silver bullets,” the rest went into the hopper. According to the EPA, our trash is composed of paper: 34.2 percent, yard trimmings: 13.1 percent, food scraps: 11.9 percent, plastics: 11.8 percent, metals: 7.6 percent, rubber, leather, and textiles: 7.3 percent, glass: 5.2 percent, wood: 5.7 percent, other: 3.4 percent. So, if we could only recycle all of our paper, we would easily increase our recycling rates to above the 30 percent rate enjoyed by our neighboring towns.
So, what incentives do Cape Elizabeth residents need to recycle more of our trash? Each percentage point we increase and sustain the recycling rate translates roughly into $5,000 in annual tax costs. Using the EPA averages, the recycling of all of our paper is worth $171,000, an increase of $91,000 over what all our recycling saves us today.
So why don’t more people do it? Do we need pay -per-bag and curbside pickup here in Cape?
In a recent conversation with Pat Anderson, Cape’s own wonderful Recycling Center attendant, she suggested that we should all begin to see the decisions of how we dispose of refuse as something similar to an investment strategy. If we invest our energy in recycling – the result will be more funds available for different town programs or a more stable tax rate. If we choose to ignore this opportunity, it is like burning money in the regional incinerator.
Beginning on May 1, it will be easier than ever to recycle household waste as EcoMaine will introduce “Single Stream Recycling.” More about this in an upcoming article.
Of course the choice of whether or not to recycle is yours, but only one option is clearly the “smart” one. I am sure we all know which one it is.
*Cape’s overall recycling rate is around 60 percent, including everything that does not go into the hopper such as concrete, oil, swap shop items, silver bullet content, etc. Local town recycling rates compared in the article are “apples-to-apples.”