Are Newtown residents - and businesses - ready to pay by the pound for solid municipal trash they are currently tossing into the waste stream?

Whether you get rid of your trash through private collection services or regular trips to the landfill, that was just one option posed during an information-packed presentation from Jennifer Heaton-Jones to the Board of Selectmen on Tuesday, February 16.

Heaton-Jones is executive director of the Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority or HRRA, the regional municipal solid waste (MSW) and recycling management organization for the Housatonic Valley municipalities of Bethel, Bridgewater, Brookfield, Danbury, Kent, New Fairfield, New Milford, Newtown, Redding, Ridgefield, and Sherman.

She was asked to visit with the selectmen to present a number of options available to the town as factors come into play having significant impact and cost ramifications on how local households and businesses pay for the trash and recycling they produce — mainly with an eye on a state goal of achieving a 60 percent diversion of waste from disposal by the year 2024.

The state is looking for municipalities and various agencies like HRRA to accomplish this by reducing waste, increasing reuse, recycling, and composting, and focusing on the development of waste conversion technologies or infrastructure, as Heaton-Jones described it.

Part of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s (DEEP) comprehensive materials management strategy, the program has three primary goals:

*To improve the performance of municipal recycling programs and reduce waste, including increasing participation and compliance with mandatory recycling provisions;

*To develop and improve recycling and waste conversion technologies; and

*To encourage corporations that design, produce, and market products to share responsibility for stewarding those materials in an environmentally sustainable manner.

To achieve the diversion goal set by the legislature in 2014, DEEP says Connecticut must reduce annual MSW by 10 percent and boost the statewide rate of recycling from 35 to 45 percent — as well as divert 300,000 tons of organic waste annually, including food scraps, to new waste conversion facilities that are currently early in development.

The state must also significantly increase the recycling of construction and demolition waste.

Recycling Cost Increases

The visit by the HRRA executive was solicited after First Selectman Dan Rosenthal reviewed bids for continued public municipal recycling services currently available to all residents regardless of how they dispose of solid waste.

“The bids were higher than any I wanted to propose in any annual budget increase, which kind of left us in limbo as far as the way forward,” Rosenthal told selectmen Maureen Crick Owen and Jeff Capeci.

The first selectman vowed to stay with the current program “for as long as we can,” but possibly take a different path in the near future.

Heaton-Jones told the board that Newtown is involved in the “waste crisis” that is impacting the state and nation, and which, to some extent, has global implications.

She said the current contract for municipal waste disposal for the HRRA communities is in effect until 2029, but warned that, considering the development and logistics that must be applied to make long-term changes in how communities handle waste and recycling, 2029 “is not far away.”

From a statewide perspective, she said the HRRA’s sister agency, which serves about one-third of the state around greater Hartford, is closing its trash-to-energy plant in July 2022. With the sheer volume of trash that region will need to divert elsewhere, ripple effects regarding cost will be felt statewide.

Heaton-Jones said that given the two known deadlines — the Hartford plant closing and the end of the HRRA’s current contract — “it is not too early for us to begin considering what we do when that contract is up, and how we begin building the infrastructure that we need, so municipalities have a plan in place.”

She reminded selectmen that by state law, all municipalities must provide residential waste disposal. To begin addressing that, the state formed the Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management (CCSMM) to provide “clarity and transparency” when it comes to costs and protocols for disposing of household waste and recycling. (See previous report published November 27.)

Heaton-Jones explained that “pay-as-you-throw” is a method of charging for trash disposal based on the amount disposed. That program, currently labeled SMART or “Save Money and Reduce Trash” in Connecticut, is globally recognized as the most effective action a municipality can take to reduce waste, increase recycling, and reduce climate impact according to the DEEP.

“That program requires consumers to only throw away what they want to pay for, like a utility” she said. “If you didn’t have to pay an electric bill, you’d leave your lights on all the time. Waste is similar — when you are disengaged with waste, you don’t really think about the cost.

“But if you had to pay for everything you had to throw away, perhaps habits would change and you’d begin to throw away less and recycle more,” she said.

Global Versus Local

On the global stage, Heaton-Jones said in 2018, when China began rejecting much of the US recycling it had previously processed, it created a huge bottleneck that, for Newtown taxpayers, drove up fees for disposal from $10 a ton to $94 a ton last fall.

Today that rate is just over $88, but it is unclear which direction future expenses will go. To help mitigate cost, HRRA started a pilot program to divert glass — the heaviest solid waste — from the single stream, and from being disposed of in landfills in other states.

That program is credited with providing the $17 per ton reduction Newtown is seeing now. She said other successful recycling programs for things like mattresses, box springs, e-waste, and paint are also making a difference.

In the case of paint recycling, the 12-town HRRA region has saved $817,000 since that program ramped up.

Refocusing on Newtown, Heaton-Jones said it is the only HRRA community that currently provides 100 percent residential curbside recycling services. Other towns either do not, or they provide waste and recycling services and either tax residents for it or pass on the household cost in the form of monthly billing.

She suggested a possible option moving forward is to create and strongly promote a community-wide survey that asks questions like “Are you hiring a private hauler for waste collection?” “Do you use provided single stream recycling?” “Do you use the transfer station?” and “What do you bring to the transfer station?”

By finding out what residents are doing with their solid waste and recycling, Heaton-Jones said, Newtown will be much better positioned to decide whether it should scrap curbside recycling, add solid waste collection to the current recycling pickups for all households, or possibly adopt the SMART protocols.

According to DEEP, by adopting a pay-as-you-throw system, the town of Mansfield has reduced the average household waste per capita from 740 to 500 pounds, and since the town of Stonington adopted the practice in 1992, it has saved taxpayers $7 million.

DEEP is finding that when residents pay directly for waste disposal services, they are provided with a financial incentive to reduce their waste through reuse or donations, waste reduction, recycling, and composting.

Look to The Newtown Bee for continued coverage on this important environmental and costly taxpayer issue as the community moves forward entertaining changes to its solid waste and recycling disposal practices.