Recycling Rollout a Community Milestone

This Month’s Team Haverhill’s TeamWorks column in the Haverhill Gazette celebrates an important milestone. The full text of the column is reproduced below.

It took 2 1/2 years and many different partners to get it done, but a big change in recycling has finally been achieved that benefits both the environment and our city’s financial bottom line.

Starting on July 6, households on all city trash collection routes will dispose of all their recyclable materials without sorting — a system called single-stream — at curbside on their route’s regular recycling day. Watch for an envelope containing a letter from Mayor Fiorentini, a brochure explaining the program, and a recycling sticker for your container, mailed courtesy of Team Haverhill to all residents.

This change fulfills a goal identified at Team Haverhill’s annual “Possible Dreams” community event in January 2008, where many residents expressed their dissatisfaction with paper-only curbside pickups and their desire for a more complete recycling program. Big dreams like this one don’t become a reality overnight, nor without support from many quarters, so we believe it is important to recall what it took to get this done.

Shortly after that “Possible Dreams” event, Team Haverhill organized a Recycling Project Committee and began to research the issue, in consultation with the city’s then-existing Recycling Committee, numerous city and state officials, and the Haverhill Environmental League. In an initial report to an open meeting on July 14, 2008, Team Haverhill’s Recycling Project Committee questioned the common assertion that broader curbside pickup could not break even, let alone produce net savings and revenue for the city.

The timing of this report proved fortuitous, since Haverhill Paperboard — purchaser of the paper picked up at the curb — had just announced that it would close by the end of the summer. By Labor Day, 1,200 residents had signed a petition asking for expanded recycling, and shortly thereafter Team Haverhill officially endorsed single-stream recycling as the best approach for Haverhill.

Project volunteers logged hundreds of hours of research and advocacy through the winter of 2008 and the spring of 2009. While municipalities usually hire costly expert consultants to undertake this kind of data analysis and public interpretation, Team Haverhill’s Recycling Project Committee worked to get the facts, formulate viable approaches, and raise public awareness that the City’s $1.3 million annual expenditure for trash disposal could be reduced.

As the recession hit and state aid was cut, recycling expansion gained momentum within the mayor’s office and City Council, and in July 2009, Mayor James Fiorentini concluded an agreement with Capitol, Haverhill’s trash and recycling hauler, to launch a single-stream curbside pilot on the Tuesday route. Recycling also emerged as a key topic in mayoral candidate debates prior to the November 2009 elections, with both candidates advocating expansion. The pilot was extended to include the Wednesday route in October 2009.

With two routes launched, our local Department of Public Works and Team Haverhill worked together to collect and analyze daily trash and recycling tonnages for the current and prior years. Data presented to City Council in February 2010, comparing the last six months of 2009 with the same period the previous year, showed a compelling trend. The recycling rate had increased by 45 percent and 50 percent, respectively, on the Tuesday and Wednesday routes. Capitol had to reassign one of its trucks previously used for trash collection to pick up recycling instead, demonstrating that the goal of trash reduction was being met.

This year’s negotiations between the city and Capitol Waste services extended the contract with Capitol for two additional years in exchange for a citywide rollout of curbside single-stream recycling at no additional cost to the city. That change takes effect July 6. We thank Mayor Fiorentini for making citywide single-stream recycling a priority in these negotiations, and we thank the whole city negotiating team that worked so hard to achieve this positive outcome.

We also extend our thanks to countless volunteers who canvassed the streets to interpret the program; to city councilors, departmental leadership and other public employees who helped get it done; to Haverhill Brightside and Haverhill Environmental League for focusing their volunteer energies on this issue; and to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection for its expertise and support.

We wish to recognize the Haverhill Public Schools as a key partner in educating the next generation about recycling and — through these children — helping today’s adults make a positive behavior change. And we owe special thanks to an anonymous donor whose $30,000 grant to Team Haverhill paid for the citywide mailing you’ll be receiving soon and for recycling containers in public schools.

Most importantly, we thank every Haverhill resident who dreamed this “possible dream,” and we encourage each household to participate fully in the new program.

Remi Depommier is co-chairman of Team Haverhill’s Recycling Project Committee. TeamWork is a monthly column by Team Haverhill to keep the community informed of the organization’s activities.