Recycle or pay?
As my family will readily admit, I am a bit of a recycling nut. I am always pulling cans out of the trash and rinsing bottles and pointing out to family members all of the items that can be recycled. I even had a compost pile for a while. Thus, I was thrilled to see the great recycling effort at the Lowell Folk Festival. I got my free bag of compost and learned that “the Festival has been recognized as a national model of sustainability, since over 90% of the festival trash is turned into garden quality mulch in just one year!” (www.lowellfolkfestival.org).
This is all well and good, but what about the City of Lowell? There seems to be a feeling out there (and in my house) that recycling doesn’t really save money since all that stuff has to be handled and sorted and disposed of in different ways. Well, after talking with Lowell’s Recycling Coordinator, Gunther Wellenstein, I have learned some interesting facts about recycling. First of all, 24% of household waste is estimated to be glass or plastic and able to be put in the green bin; 39% is paper and cardboard. Yard waste is another 14% and 6% is waste that could be composted (kitchen scraps). If every bottle, can and carrot was disposed of through recycling or composting, it would divert 83% of our total waste from the State’s incinerators. Currently the city only diverts around 10% (although this number was skewed lower by the huge amount of debris resulting from the 2006 floods; we are actually closer to 13%). Why is this important? Well, the city is charged by the ton for non-recyclable waste – the trash in barrels at the curb that are picked up by BFI. When BFI takes the waste to the State incinerators, it is weighed and the city is charged again. Recyclables are only charged once and at a lower rate. At one point, it was estimated that each 1% of waste that could be diverted from the incinerators would save the city $53,000. This may not seem all that impressive until you realize that Worcester (a much larger city) is consistently able to divert around 50% of its waste. Do the math, and think of the teachers, police cars, sidewalks or snow-plowing we could pay for with that savings. The difference may be that Worcester has a ‘pay-as-you-throw’ program, forcing people to be mindful of how many garbage bags they put at the curb on trash day. Is this what it will take to increase recycling in Lowell?