Council members should consider options for dealing with escalating recycling costs at the Transfer Station, Town Manager Tim Pellerin suggested at this week’s Town Council meeting.
“People in South Berwick need to know that while recycling is good for the environment, it is also expensive,” Pellerin said.
The costs associated with recycling – in particular, shipping material to recycling centers – are “killing us,” he added.
The inability of the Transfer Station’s cardboard machine to handle the volume of cardboard being discarded and the difficulty of staffing the facility both add to costs, the town manager said. Curbside recycling, an option in which towns pick up recycling from residents’ homes, would be even more costly, he said.
“We need to streamline our recycling operations and make them more cost-efficient for taxpayers,” he said.
The current system that requires residents to sort plastics, glass, metals, paper and cardboard saves money for the town over single stream recycling, said Pellerin.
With single-stream recycling, all recyclables are collected together and sent to a facility with equipment to separate various materials. Some savings for the town could be realized because Transfer Station staffing could be reduced, Pellerin said, but he did not indicate whether the town would see a net savings or increased cost.
“It would just require one person to operate the (recycling) machine and one person to collect dump fees,” he said. Three to four employees now staff the Transfer Station on each shift.
The blue bag system by which non-recyclables are discarded offsets about $100,000 of Transfer Station costs annually, according to Jennifer Janelle, assistant town manager.
If the town were to move to single-stream recycling, the Transfer Station would have to be reconfigured to eliminate individual stations and include one large recycling bin, according to Councilor Jeff Minihan. Councilors agreed with Pellerin’s proposal that town residents be fully educated about the issue as a first step toward reaching a decision. A series of public recycling workshops, possibly as early as this spring, was suggested by the town manager.
