Recycling success starts at home

DUTCHESS COUNTY —  “If you are concerned enough to make this work, it starts at your house,” stated Scott Cale of Welsh Sanitation, the company in charge of picking up Millerton’s residential and commercial waste stream—both garbage and recycling—and delivering it to a sorting facility.

What prevents efficient recycling

“About 65-70% of people care, and comply in recycling properly,” Cale noted; the remaining percentage represents contamination, often of the entire load of recycling, which makes it unmarketable except as garbage, and defeats the purpose of recycling.

In the village of Millerton and the Town of North East, the huge blue trucks rumbling through the streets early on Monday mornings are a familiar sight and sound and, for some, a cause for confusion.  Since the trucks used for garbage and those used for recycling are the same type,  working on the same routes but at different times, some residents have expressed doubts as to whether those two streams are in fact mixed in the trucks.

One reason for the confusion, which stymied even a newly-hired compliance officer from Dutchess County, may be that split-body trucks do exist that can hold both streams.  Those are familiar to residents of Millbrook, for example, but are not used in Millerton.

An optional service

In Millerton, Welsh Sanitation, a division of Royal Carting, is the hauler of both garbage and recycling, and this service is optional. Residents have the choice as to whether to use Welsh, or to take their own garbage and recycling to a transfer station in Dover Plains/Wingdale for a per-load fee.

Most homeowners choose to pay Welsh for their Monday pickups, with the fee varying based on the size of the garbage and/or recycling containers, which are robust plastic affairs intended to be slung aloft and dropped back down by huge mechanized claws on the trucks. An average payment for two regular-sized container pickups is $73 every two months, recently increased from $66.

Each truck can service about 700 homes, except at winter holiday times with the extra loads of wrapping paper and such. In those cases, Welsh trucks may take loads to Hillsdale for dumping before completing their Millerton rounds.

Why “single-stream”?

Unlike systems in some other locales, the system in use by Dutchess County, and thus followed by Millerton and North East, is “single-stream,” meaning that all recyclables—noted as such on handouts and flyers from both Welsh and Dutchess County, with variations—are put into a single, orange-lidded receptacle; emptied into recycling-only trucks; and taken to a “tipping floor” in the Dover Plains transfer station. There, obviously inappropriate or too-large items may be sorted out, but this step is mainly one of transferring the recycling stream onto tractor-trailers headed for ReCommunity, a sorting facility in Beacon, for processing.

Single-stream has both adherents and detractors, with aspects that are beyond the scope of this report, but that need close attention going forward.

Multi-bin recycling, the norm for decades in European countries, only works if there is a market for each type of recycling waste—cardboard, glass, metal and plastics—and only if residents are careful to rinse out containers, separate obviously dirty items, and follow guidelines.

Contamination, lack of compliance hobble recycling efforts

Unfortunately, the 30-35% of potentially recyclable waste typically made unrecyclable may contain pizza boxes with greasy residues, obvious garbage, and in one case Cale cited, pieces of gypsum sheetrock,  some of which may be caught by human sorters, and all of which can seriously hamper or damage the machines used for next steps in recycling.

Recently, a group of senior citizens in Millerton was told by a solid-waste educator that “objects smaller than your fist” should never be put into recycling. Since pet-food tins and other items containing potentially valuable materials like aluminum, other metals or glass may be small, and no guidelines as to size were stated anywhere, this news was met with some consternation by people who felt they had followed the rules, yet failed at the effort.

Any material that fails to be recycled may be burned in an incinerator in Poughkeepsie or elsewhere in a process known as “waste to energy,” with some of the metals, for example, recoverable. The other main outcome is dumping waste in landfills which, Cale pointed out, are “state of the art” in New York state, with liners and other practices to prevent leaching into the soil and water of surrounding communities.

A system in need of change

The cost to Welsh for each truck is in the $300,000 range, and for each receptacle—lent to homeowners for free—about $85. Welsh pays the sorting facility $150 per ton to take its loads,  while garbage costs it $110 per ton. Even with the recent fees to homeowners having increased by 10%, it is an enterprise that is struggling to keep up with rising consumer output, according to Cale.

Dutchess County is releasing its new 10-year plan for solid waste.  In the meantime, to help the system work better, see the following: royalcarting.com/tips-for-reducing-household-waste