More Recycling? Not A Trashy Idea

Regionalized composting, recycling bin chips, and refuse savvy students could all lie in New Haven’s future — if the city gets requested dollars and support needed to amp up sustainable waste management education and practices.

Representatives of the city’s health and climate departments broached those ideas during a multi-part City Services & Environmental Policy (CSEP) Committee hearing that took place on Thursday night in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall. 

The committee alders voted unanimously in favor of both applying for and accepting two different grants that, if awarded, could pay for a city-wide public education campaign on recycling and the implementation of a regional composting program.

The first grant could bring in $2 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. If awarded those funds, the city would use that money to hire three temporary employees over the next three years to track recycling habits and teach residents how to dispose of their trash.

The second pot of money is another $4 million from the EPA that New Haven is co-applying for along with West Haven city government in hopes of growing a regionalized system to deal with food waste. The grant would cover the cost of waste sorting and decontaminating machinery that would live in West Haven while remaining available to interested municipal partners. The grant would also help pay for New Haven to start co-collecting food waste and other refuse, a practice that West Haven has been in the process of piloting for the past several months.

Those initiatives arrive a few months into former alder Steve Winter’s appointment as the city’s first ever director of climate and sustainability. They also come alongside news that his office is doubling in size to include another city employee, thanks to the Elicker Administration’s recent hire of a full-time sustainability policy analyst and engagement coordinator.

At Thursday’s aldermanic committee hearing, Winter urged the importance of reimagining how New Haven handles its waste by pressing both the fiscal and environmental impact of over-incineration.

The city’s public works department serves about 37,000 households ranging from one-family homes to six-unit apartments. Over the last fiscal year, about 35,000 tons of refuse were produced by those households, Winter said. 

“It’s kind of mind boggling — almost a ton of waste per household,” he said. 

Adding in businesses and larger residences, 101,785 tons of refuse was produced in total. ​“It’s hard to comprehend numbers that big, but that’s about 200 million pounds of trash in one year.”

Since a waste-to-energy facility plant in Hartford overseen by the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA) closed last summer, Winter noted that tipping fees to incinerate waste have risen by more than $100 per ton. The more recyclable or compostable waste going into the incinerator, the higher the potential fiscal impact.

New Haven’s and other municipalities’ movement towards more sustainable waste management comes as the state grapples with how to enforce and investigate the issue of trash haulers failing to properly dispose of what recyclables residents do set aside. Read more about that in the Connecticut Mirror here.

Only about 15.7 percent of household waste and bulk trash that the city picks up from residences is recycled. And, he said, it’s estimated that 29.5 percent of all the solid waste produced by the city is food scraps that could be composted. 

Winter said the city should focus on altering those statistics by working with residents to produce less trash overall, amp up the rate of recycling and decrease practical errors that contaminate recycling streams, and introduce a local composting system.

"Ray Cycle" Returns?

The first part of that plan involves monitoring who is recycling in the right or wrong ways around the city and then taking corrective measures. 

Health Department programming directors Brooke Logan and Julia Einhorn joined Winter in explaining how New Haven is considering achieving that aim.

Money from the grant would go towards hiring a recycling coordinator, recycling educator and a public space inspector as well as purchasing radio frequency chips that would adhere to recycling bins and register which households are at a minimum attempting to participate in recycling.

The first hire would be a public space inspector who would patrol neighborhoods and streets and give residents feedback about contaminated recycling bins while a recycling educator would lead more proactive outreach. That would include going into schools, appearing at community events, and leading focus groups and surveys to both explain how to recycle to various communities while teasing out data collection to understand which neighborhoods are or aren’t recycling properly and why.

“The health department has been successful with community-based social marketing campaigns around vaccination,” Winter offered as an example for why the health department would be well equipped to lead multilingual recycling education outreach.

A third recycling coordinator would act as an administrative agent to oversee and merge those various efforts. All three individuals would be new hires whose jobs would likely be terminated after the special grant runs out. 

A cover letter to the alders describing the grant said that the program would be ​“street-based, individualized education and outreach to community members and businesses” focused on the ​“Annex, Fair Haven, Amity, Dixwell, Beaver Hills, and West River neighborhoods.”

Alders welcomed the idea, stressing the urgency of returning to a strong pro-recycling message in schools as a way to kickstart broader community adherence to recycling.

“What’s happening in schools? I don’t think they’re recycling at all,” Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller said. ​“We used to have a guy who came out in a suit and sang… ​‘Ray Cycle!’” 

Winter said he was only aware of the Sound School and Clinton Avenue School having launched recycling and compost education. The total recycling rate across the school system in particular, he said, was in the ​“low single digits.” School Spokesperson Justin Harmon did not respond to request for further comment from the Independent for this article.

“I remember we had a song about styrofoam,” Logan pitched in. Educating students on how to recycle, she said, can be an effective way ​“to bring the message back to home.”

Winter said that he would hope to see the city’s recycling rate increase from 15 to around 22 percent with the grant’s assistance.

Composting Regionalization Raised

The second part of revamping New Haven’s waste management discussed at Thursday’s hearing is a broader, multi-part plan to develop a regionalized composting system.

New Haven is the co-applicant on a grant that would pay for key composting machinery to be housed in West Haven but shared by interested municipal partners including Hamden and Branford. 

In tandem with those regional equipment purchases, New Haven would also follow in the footsteps of towns like West Haven to implement a co-collection system of trash pick-up. Winter said that would mean distributing color coded bags to residents, likely through the city’s grocery stores for a small fee, such that individuals could put food waste and organics in green bags and all other trash in orange bags. 

The grant money would cover the costs of purchasing a sorting machine and related labor. Public works employees would manually take green bags off a conveyor belt and send the organics to West Haven. Grant-funded decontaminating and de-packaging devices would then extract any non-organics from the biodegradables, such as plastics with food waste inside of them.

Read more about West Haven’s co-collection system, the first pilot of its kind in the state, here. The New Haven Register recently reported that the town has faced difficulties getting program participants to successfully separate food scraps and waste among the green and orange trash bags, instead uncovering things like sneakers planted inside the food scraps. 

A summary of the grant submitted to the alders states that any participating municipalities will select an operating entity, like the Solid Waste Authority or the South Central Regional Council of Governments, to manage the implementation of such a program so that West Haven, for example, is not overloaded with incoming compost. 

By storing the food waste in aerated static piles, the municipalities will allow for aerobic composting before potentially selling the final product to bring in additional income for the town. Hamden currently creates topsoil and other composted materials at its own transfer station — read more here.

A site for regionalized composting has yet to be determined. Winter noted that West Haven currently trucks their food waste out to Southington where it’s processed using a biogas digester. Composting locally, he said, could save additional costs and emissions associated with moving the waste from place to place.

“I commend our director for bringing this forward,” Hill Alder Kampton Singh said following Winter’s presentation.

“Composting is something we should’ve been doing all along,” East Rock Alder Anna Festa agreed. ​“It’s something other countries are doing and there’s no reason why we in the States should not be doing this, or even us in New Haven with our 135,000 residents.”