by Eric Richard

This post contains notes from a session I attended today at a workshop hosted by MassDEP.

Dennis Lipka, Town of Holden

The Town of Holden has had municipal trash collection (using one hauler) since 2000.  All of our waste goes to Wheelabrator.

We cover single family homes and multifamily residences w/ fewer than 4 units. It is a fee based system (using an Enterprise fund).

In 2004, our recycling rate was at 14%.  In 2005, we implemented an overflow fee — anything outside of the 95 gallon tote would have to use a fee-based bag.

We actually use the bags as a promotional opportunity.  They say “Town of Holden” on them, but they also list out the things that are not allowed in the trash bags.

In 2007, we  decided to switch vendors.  We invited in other haulers, one of whom was Casella.  They wanted to provide an additional 95 gallon container for recyclables along with much more aggressive marketing and education (including education at the elementary schools).

We realized that the 95 gallon trash container sent the wrong message.  The optimized message is a much smaller trash container and a larger recycling bin.

We also realized there are some interesting dynamics in recycling:

• People will recycle to the capacity that you provide.  Therefore, if you give them a larger recycling container, they will recycle more
• Covered containers provide some magic.  People are more likely to recycle more if their recycling containers are covered.

So, when we talked w/ Casella, we decided that we wanted 65 gallon trash containers and 95 gallon recycling containers.

On July 1, we went live with single stream recycling.  With a 95 gallon container, we thought that semi-weekly recycling would work.

One of the nice things about the single stream is its simplicity; if it is in the toter, it goes — we don’t fight about the size of the cardboard. People are finding the system to be very easy to use.  Single stream is much less of a hassle.

On the first month, we doubled our recycling rate to 35%. We added an extra week of recycling on for Christmas and we broke 41% recycling for that week.

We offer two plans:

• 65-gal trash + 95 gal-recycling for $15 / month
• 35-gal trash + 35 gal-recycling for $11 / month

Both plans include the toters and recycling bins.

All Casella people go through a customer service training program that we specified.

The base contract is 5 years with 3 five-year optional extensions. The contract included purchase of all of the toters.

We had 400 people opt-out initially, but have gotten about 100 of those people back.

We have not had any problems w/ the semi-automated system.  If you were in Downtown Boston in Chinatown, you might have some problems.  But, in normal streets, we haven’t had any problems.

Casella has been very proactive about interacting with the community.  They work with people like the Boy Scouts.  They put together promotional literature.  They are putting together a video that we will air on cable TV.  They have a customer service operation that operates 16 hours a day 7 days a week.

Residents are very pleased with the program.