Four southern Maine municipalities took to the streets in the summer of 2019, inspecting recycling bins and educating residents about what is and is not recyclable. The pilot program, in partnership with ecomaine, led to lower recycling contamination rates and decreased costs for the towns of Falmouth, Scarborough, South Portland, and Windham.
Staff from each municipality and ecomaine presented their findings and a toolkit at the Town of Scarborough’s Council Chambers, in the hopes that their success will inspire other communities to do the same. By selecting collection routes and monitoring central recycling drop-off locations, interns reached more than 4,200 households with education provided on green, yellow, and red tags. Green indicated that the household was recycling properly; yellow meant that a bin contained a few items that were not recyclable; red indicated too much contamination to be picked up.
Over the course of the pilot’s eight weeks, green tags increased by an average of 19%, leading to a reduction in costs by 67%, or an average of $4,000 per town.“We realized that this was an important investment to make from the outset,” said Lucy Perkins, South Portland’s Sustainability Program Coordinator. “Though it required some resources and training at the beginning, we feel that the program was well worth it, and we look forward to seeing the results into the future.”
Kevin Roche, CEO at ecomaine, added, “ecomaine is glad to partner with our member communities on important programs like this. We could tell there was lots of enthusiasm in these students from their weeklong training session with us, and the results have been terrific for ecomaine and these four communities.”
Questions from attendees for the panel included topics such as budgeting and planning, promotion and publicity, and logistics of selecting a collection route or drop-off location. The program was initiated in these communities as a result of increasing costs associated with contamination in the recycling stream, following China’s National Sword policy to restrict most recyclables from being imported. In order to process non-recyclable materials in its single-sort recycling program, ecomaine has been pushed to enforce its contamination fee structure.