Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
MMA Innovation Award winner, 2011
Officials and volunteers in Hamilton and Wenham, where curbside pick-up of organic waste has been available on a trial basis since last April, are hopeful that the program can become self-sustaining.
By early January, the two towns were close to their goal of having 770 participants in the voluntary program, according to Gretel Clark, chair of the Hamilton-Wenham Recycling Committee.
Each participating household is paying $75 to help finance the program, believed to be the first of its kind on the East Coast. Participants receive a 13-gallon organic-waste bin with wheels and a flip-top lid as well as a smaller countertop collector. Participants also are eligible for as much free composting as they need from the Hamilton company that receives the food waste.
For the two towns, the composting program has the potential to significantly reduce waste-hauling tipping fees; preliminary figures indicated that participating households were generating 17 pounds of organic waste per week, well over half the 27 pounds of overall solid waste that a typical family generates. Solid waste tipping fees are almost double those for waste that can be composted, so the more homes that are recycling their organic waste, the lower the overall hauling costs for the two towns.
“I’ve been heartened that the chatter around town is basically positive, that people like the program, that they discuss it with their neighbors,” Clark said.
In response to a survey this past fall, 94 percent of participants indicated they would re-enroll in the program for the following year, assuming that the price was the same, Clark said.
Local officials and volunteers, meanwhile, are examining strategies for broadening participation. One would involve adopting the Department of Environmental Protection’s “Pay As You Throw” program, which would give residents an incentive to recycle their organic waste while providing additional revenue to pay for the program. Another possibility, according to Clark, would be to make organic recycling mandatory, a step that San Francisco and Seattle have taken.
Area waste-haulers are looking at the possibility of creating split-bodied trucks that could collect organic waste as well as regular trash, Clark said.
Because the current one-year pilot program is due to end on March 31, local officials must find a way to bridge the three months before the beginning of the new fiscal year on July 1.
“We have every intention of getting to the end of the [current] fiscal year,” said Michael Lombardo, the town administrator in Hamilton, which is managing the program on Wenham’s behalf. “The last thing we want is to lose momentum.”
For more information, contact Gretel Clark at (978) 468-7206.
The winners of the annual Kenneth Pickard Municipal Innovation Awards were recognized at the MMA Annual Meeting on Jan. 22.