WasteZero, a benefit corporation with a mission to cut waste around the country, pitched a program designed to do just that for Old Saybrook at the Dec. 17 Board of Finance (BOF) meeting. This was the company’s second presentation to the town; the first was to the Board of Selectmen in 2018.

Kristen Brown, WasteZero’s vice president of waste reduction strategy, introduced BOF members to the company’s SMART program, which is being underwritten for Connecticut towns by the state Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (DEEP).

The program would introduce specially designated plastic bags to be used for waste that residents bring to the transfer station. Those bags, which would be made available at local grocery stores and other locations—making them as convenient as possible to obtain—would be sold carrying a small fee that incorporates the cost to the town of processing that waste, whether in part or in full.

Recycling brought to the transfer station would not be subject to the fee.

Based on WasteZero’s data—the company works with around 800 communities across the U.S., according to Brown—this one change consistently results in a reduction of waste of around 50 percent, lowering those communities’ waste costs accordingly.

Concerns About Waste Disposal

First Selectman Carl P. Fortuna, Jr., has been increasingly concerned about the rising costs and limited opportunities for the disposal of waste. The town currently delivers its waste to the state’s main facility in South Meadows, near Hartford, run by a non-profit, quasi-public entity called MIRA (Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority), which burns the trash and converts it to energy.

That facility is aging, however. After talks failed last year with the company chosen to renovate and operate the facility, Sacyr Rooney Recovery team, a second electricity-generating turbine failed while the first was out for repair. Operations came to a halt and waste had to be transported out of state.

The turbines were eventually replaced, but the South Meadows plant is expected to operate as a trash-to-energy plant only for another three years, Fortuna explained at the meeting.

“If it goes away and there is no successor plan—there are a couple of balls in the air on that,” Fortuna said, “it’ll become a transfer station and they will ship it wherever they can ship it.”

Given the plant’s age, Fortuna believes that three years is an optimistic projection.

“The turbines are 70 to 80 years old,” he said.

Trash-to-energy plants are closing all over New England, Brown said, and there’s only one landfill for residential waste left in the region, in Rhode Island; it is slated to close in the next few years.

“When that landfill closes, that will put an even bigger squeeze on New England states,” she said. “[W]e have limited capacity to handle this trash, which is one of the reasons that the cost is going up.”

MIRA’s current tip fee (the cost per ton for towns to dump their waste at the facility) is $83, said Fortuna, up from $66 around a year ago and $55 not long before that. As options for waste disposal decrease, tip fees increase. According to reporting by the Connecticut Mirror, MIRA’s tip fees are expected to rise to $140 in the near future, Fortuna said.

Exporting waste to other states has its own risks and costs, not merely due tvo transportation expenses. In addition to tip fees, towns could find themselves subject to state surcharges imposed on waste from elsewhere.

“If there’s a way to manage our materials better within the state of Connecticut, that’s the best the way to go, moving forward,” said Brown.

Cost is not the only issue. Prior to the BOF meeting, Fortuna emailed BOF members two articles from the CT Examiner that examine the issue of air pollution caused by the incineration of trash. Plants such as the one in South Meadows tend to be located in poorer areas, subjecting disadvantaged residents to health concerns caused by the emissions.

Climate change is another concern.

“Garbage is huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, so diverting material does affect your carbon footprint,” Brown said.

Finding local solutions also leads to local jobs, she added.

Addressing the Problem

WasteZero has been working on reducing waste for around 20 years, Brown explained. The company has been consulting with DEEP for about four years.

“For the first couple of years [of working with DEEP], we did a lot of deep-dive research into the waste stream in Connecticut, trying to look at ways to move the cities and towns here into what’s called unit-based pricing,” she said.

“If you are paying by the unit for what you throw away, you throw away significantly less—about 50 percent less—and you divert the other 50 percent of material either into a recycling stream...or into the re-use stream,” she continued.

The amount of trash Americans throw away has decreased over time, according to Brown. In 1990, Americans disposed of around 990 pounds of residential trash per capita.

“Now the average is down across the board,” she said.

Connecticut’s rate is around the national average—residents toss roughly 740 pounds annually.

“It’s still a lot,” Brown said, but legislative efforts and educational campaigns have managed to reduce the amount that’s discarded.

In the next 30 years, the national rate is expected to decrease to around 590 pounds per capita. New initiatives, such as curbside food waste collection, have the potential to lower that rate even more.

“There are places, many places around the country, that do better than even 590” pounds per capita, Brown said.

Portland, Maine has managed to reduce its waste to around 286 pounds per capita, beating out cities like San Francisco, which has been recycling for far longer.

There are 556 communities across the country that have unit-based pricing—SMART programs, Brown continued.

“All are throwing away somewhere between 286 and 450 pounds per capita,” she said. Old Saybrook, too, “could get there.

“We expect Portland in the next couple of years to be down at around 150 pounds per capita because they’re adding food waste collection,” she said.

Based on recent consultant data provided to her by Fortuna, Brown estimated the cost savings to Old Saybrook of a SMART program. A portion of residents contract with private trash haulers; Brown’s figures are based on the estimated number of those who bring their household waste to the town’s transfer station, roughly 1,300 of a total of 4,180 homes in Old Saybrook.

Using a projected tip fee of $95 (the current fee is $83 and increasing) and a recycling rate of 19 percent of total waste delivered to the transfer station, Brown estimates 998 tons of garbage diverted from the transfer station each year and an annual savings to the town of around $95,000 in tip fees. In 10 years, the savings to the town could be as much as $1 million, she said.

Brown encouraged the town to consider testing the program out for a limited period, and Fortuna said that a pilot lasting a year to 15 months is under consideration. The SMART program requires only official plastic bags and not any infrastructure changes, Brown pointed out, and thus is simple to try.

Resident Satisfaction

While it does require residents to adjust to a new process, before long, most find it easy and are encouraged by the immediate results, Brown said.

When she worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Brown helped conduct a survey of residents in Natick, Massachusetts, where a SMART program had recently been implemented. She and her colleagues asked those leaving a local Stop & Shop with the town’s blue official trash bags what they thought of the program.

“Literally we had no negative comments,” she said. “The primary comment we had was, ‘I only use one bag a week.’ They couldn’t wait to tell you that whatever size [bag] they were using, they were only using one.”

Stonington and East Lyme instituted SMART programs at around the same time, Brown said. East Lyme’s first selectman decided to end its program, while Stonington residents came out during a snowstorm to overwhelmingly support it in a referendum. Stonington has since saved millions of dollars, according to Brown.

As the price that residents pay for the town’s official bag includes all or part of the cost of processing the waste it contains, Brown estimated that Old Saybrook could bring in as much as $124,000 per year in transfer station revenue. The cost of running the transfer station would also decrease, due to the reduction in waste, thereby lowering the town’s costs overall.

Director of Public Works Larry Bonin asked about the impact on contamination of recyclables due to residents diverting some of their garbage to the recycling bin. He also wondered if there would be an increase in illegal dumping by residents wanting to save money.

“This program has slightly lower contamination because people are incentivized to read the directions to learn what can and cannot go into recycling,” Brown said. “A lot of contamination comes from wishful recycling” of plastics and other materials that residents assume are recyclable but aren’t.

As for illegal dumping, based on multiple studies, it neither increases nor decreases, according to Brown.

“Of all of the implemented projects that I’ve been a part of, we haven’t seen any increase in illegal dumping,” she said.

The risks to Old Saybrook testing out a SMART program are nil, she said.

“If you try it and you hate it, you don’t have to keep it,” she said. “There really isn’t any big infrastructure change here. It’s just making a deal so that the bags can be in the store for X period of time.

“I do find that when you pilot it, every community—other than the East Lyme situation—keeps it,” she said.