in people who are born in the year of the dog are said to possess the following traits their honest friendly faithful loyal single agenda item or single agenda meeting in i'm going to introduce jay marcotte who's going to make a presentation and you're going to face the camera when you make the presentation i think you can get it from  last week this is a follow up from last week's amendment vote for the current contract that we're in with our hauler and for the future contract coming up what we have  there were faced with i should say the town is the single stream recycling is our only option for collection and throughout this this presentation i'll get into the details as to how and why and what options we have available first i want to talk about just a little bit as the history sorry is how we got to the situation just so everyone is informed  what had happened in the fall or towards the end of the fall i should say china came up with a national sword program basically telling the world to clean up  china is the largest buyer and seller recycles in the world do the high levels of contamination recycling that ends up as trash national sword was initiated setting strict standards and basically telling the world to stop sending your gardeners so contaminated were forced to invest in cleaning up their act so what that meant was the processing fees drastically increased across country while the value of the recycling plummeted that being that they had to invest in more line workers they had to invest in better infrastructure better equipment created more cost at the same time it slowed everything down having stockpiles of recycling that they had known  far year ago you know a year ago today basically if you were to look at this mers had two different ways of how they dealt with recycling to a stream or single stream single excuse me the majority of the communities in the boston area will stream that is where we were last week going to amend our current contract so on july first two thousand and eighteen belmont will be collecting recycling a single stream we have no choice that is our option to to through either material recycling facility or a material recovering slowly recovering facility so collecting single stream we have a choice manual which is the option that we have on the left it's everything mixed into our current orders or automated which is how we're going to be collecting our trash manual single stream this is if we were to go with a manual single stream this is what it would look like at the curb we would be going collecting trash automated which is the army and barrel in this picture and the single stream manual would look like the current toters that we have personally told is that we have now or you know a lottery basket or whatever anything that is that you have for a container mixed all together clean and it will be collected thrown into one single hopper a single stream the other option is automated our trash this is what to look like at the curb and the other barrel is probably for organics or  waste time material but the this is what to look like at the curb it would be there are sixty four gallon trash container with a ninety six gallon town issued container and we have some on this play here  for people to see that are in the crowd there actually show material to compare weights so the currents are few that we have all right now we have  negotiating with our lowest best hauler or qualified hauler and these are the prices that we are looking at for manual versus automated automated has the cost of the ninety six  container within that price so in the first year we're looking at about a twenty thousand dollar difference and it creeps up all the way to thirty two and change your five that is the difference between the years because of the cost of the containers which is a total of one hundred fifty thousand dollars over the five years in year six which is what we show here as an option here manual that is eight hundred seventeen thousand and automated drops to seven hundred forty seven thousand and that is because the barrels are paid for and we are now just paying for the collection year two it's about that so that's a seventy thousand dollars difference from year six in favor of automated year seven it's about a seventy five thousand dollars difference but that is another option here so the so what we're looking at is a thirty thousand dollars savings for manual collection or to reinvest into the automated single stream with a ninety six count in tain or the purpose of this meeting was to inform the board selectman and the community of what options we had available single stream is the definite way method in which we are going to be collecting it is just a matter of how the recommendation from public works would be to collect it single stream automated but in light of the complete change of everything that is going on for trash and recycling we would be we know we're going to single stream we could deal with manual for the first contract and then look to it implemented in the next contract so if you were to ask right now what would i do i would recommend single stream automated but i understand the sensitivity of the situation contract when it would be how they would be investing in the equipment to collect if we were going to tell the vendor we're going single stream automated they would invest in an automated piece of equipment if we go manual completely different piece of four that is currently full of trash i won't tell i will say that recycling to have that ability there that is trash that is what we're going to be creating for sixty four gallon automated trash on the right on the right on the left   they would offer cardboard recycling events like similar to what we're doing right now which would take that good cardboard which has value out of our stream or we have to pay for it throughout the year or whatever depending on how many events that we have so don't have from a market place perspective we have to accept single street drugs hauler is going to be it on your street we had that happen this past go round ok so now it's a decision between whether we do it in automated way using this single stream we're kind of indifferent because dual stream requires you to separate paper from recyclables at the curbside and single stream just as you put it all together how they're willing to process so right from our standpoint you know either the residents separated curbside are or they don't so for me it's not whether it's single stream or do the beta was not everything though it had always been as i understood it it could be one years that w single stream perhaps you might get an increase in recycle which is a good thing we may have some contamination is as of now and correct you're absolutely correct that is actually part of their formula for this blended pricing contamination is part of the ok jay we've talked about cardboard still has value so we've talked about the idea of having the seasonal seasonable great if we could do it we're doing or doing right now by doing monthly if we wanted to do it monthly data that has been discussed in this current the next contract yes right now are having like a seasonal cardboard about which we just had one this past week but but in the in the in the new one of four people who are concerned about the environment and concerned about the cost and concerned about the use of the recyclables we could we could have free is misleading i don't know and i'm sorry mary he's talking about the events that we're having right now if we take that cardboard out of the processing stream then we would not be paid we would not be paying for that cardboard it would be escape so what can you tell us about what i think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what goes into recycling all right also so let's talk about the single strain ok i'm going to ask you some questions ok single stream recycling i have cardboard and i a paper i'm going to recycle that in my single stream recycling yes am i  got this plastic thing under now and it's got plastic now that goes into the trash so yes yes and then what else can i think about i i rise i then decide that i'm going to go to the deli counter whole foods and i buy a veggie on sale and they put it in a plastic thing that's going to pop that clicks and what happens to that so right now plastics one through seven and if it has a one to seven on it you can put it in your single stream if it's from actually recycled yes so right now they're saying one to use have value and five add three to seven  and three to seven is a charge yes so i would say ones and twos for plastic and most valuable and fives are now becoming because of a different market someone is door stream will be recyclable single string the two different things do all stream was a way of collecting and processing i understand and same with single string  i we used to be dual stream in the community i live we switched to single stream but i still in my house do dual stream because that's my happy no i understand so if people put everything out to all stream when we go to manual single stream or if if we do cart you have to put everything together but you could separated still because it's all going to go in one container the shrugs that everybody knows what's recyclable and what's sometimes you can't you can't put that goes into the trash right right and if it has a lot of grease and food on it also so so what else can you not put it or shouldn't you put in the recycling because now we're going to have to pay for it and i think people are putting stuff in there that they shouldn't be putting in their own way all right so what i would say we have a brochure and we have pictures and yes i'm sorry to interrupt and i just want to caution the board on  right now we pay sixty five dollars a ton for trash six five and change what we're looking at for recycling processing fee is in the mid forty's it's still cheaper than trash it is  people to recycle but we want them to do it right so a lot of people think that anything plastic and they'll take apart things in have these plastic pieces and say it's plastic i'm going to put it in the bin and that's considered contamination little bits a metal you know they they put that in because it's metal but it's not a container so there's there's different the markets are set up different materials in on if you a lot of the todas will have on it mauled it on the top of the lid exactly what you can put in the biggest thing is plastic bags and plastic film and people just like to put their recycling in there because it's in the mid season to take it out to the curb to put it in their bin and that's the worst thing you can do because it jams up there in the machines ok so as i'm understanding it we do not want glass in the trash and neither does the state and yes so for that reason it's considered recyclable even though it's not the one you know it's good government the next thing is any plastic or glass container with a metal lid is ok yes that's ok yes we do not want plastic and  can certainly educate however if we did manual pick up single stream you could still use your same container separate if you want to you don't have to separate whatever you want to do we can provide opportunities for the cardboard more because it seems very popular these cardboard  still be able to put also basically if you did manual pick up a siphon factor the manuals cheaper than the automated if you did the manual pickup and you did the single stream there wouldn't be any change to the residents considering how much change we're already imposing with the trash you know maybe it's best to not make it right i mean  difference is they are here tater would sink or you know if you've had people communicating about the size of the sixty four rows now you're going to give me an i want twenty six pounds ninety six gallon which is a big one i think i think what's interesting to me about that is that last time we didn't have a ninety six gallon container here and now we do and it doesn't look that much different than the sixty who are pretty big in my house at the september twelfth meaning to me it doesn't look that much different both but i thought kate bowen had the best the best com point in time and what's actually the cycle so glass is very recyclable we're just seeing very bad markets right now and the closure of the facility here one thing that happens when you start charging for some of these commodity processing is you kind of can pay more for people to start reusing it so i don't think that we should conclude that these materials are never going to find a market we're just going through a difficult period right now before you go on  if i go buy a bottle of wine and it's packaged in a bottle you know i used to feel ok about that because i could just put it in the recycle bin and i knew it was being melted and made into other glass for other uses but now i learned that that's not true when is it has that ever been true or if there is the policy simply to keep glass out of the try should because the trace was burned and you don't want glass the in the trash so historically glass was very recyclable it was it was washed that's the best way to do it in refills there are a lot of technologies i think gallo wine had an amazing one where they would take a mix colors and convert it into new bottles but for a while in massachusetts there have been problems with glass outlet markets and i think they were crushing it and using it as an alternative cover in landfills and calling it recycling and i think that's a problem but we have this issue with other some of the plastics we have this issue with some of the aluminum oils because the cans are easy but the aluminum tops which going on more and more plastic containers are not as easy to recycle but i don't want to we aren't making state law and the markets are fluid and even the markets in china are fluid and it's not clear that they will be blocking recycling for the five year term of this contract we have to deal with the very difficult reality that jay is facing in the last few months but we shouldn't assume that in your three or year five the scrap markets are going to be as bad as they are now and we should think in the contract to the extent it's possible if things get better how do we participate in it and if things stay bad how do we protect the town from from risk but i understand that today mostly we're talking about the toters here and i did have just a couple of questions on that the cost differential is a bit lower than i was expecting because these things cost fifty or sixty dollars each so my assumption is that there's savings in collection costs that are generating benefits for the town and is that correct j that that's one of the reasons the cough the costs are very similar between automated emanuel the barrels are fifty three dollars each and the reason why they cost is in my opinion fairly soon i'm sorry fairly similar is because of the let's just say it's not streamlined the driver sauce to come out the driver saw is to put the barrel into the hopper or put it back so there's deficiencies assist scale here that's the reason why there's a difference between the price of corus it's close that's why i should say ok excuse me on that one how many barrels do we have to buy so we would have to buy ten thousand and sixty four and ten five years car over over five correct ok thank you and that and then the last question that i had i was glad to hear that we can still put corrugated in curbside because that's important but i see enormous volumes of cardboard at people's homes and i'm wondering is that container large enough to handle all the cardboard last two weeks of recycling and and what's been the experience in the surrounding towns that are using this for collection so for every other week recycling ninety six till it is recommended and if you flatten all your cardboard yes you most likely will get it  if we go to automated you can't put cardboard alongside the art automated you have to put it in the in the container right yet correct so when you were saying that the cardboard pickup would you meant under manual that the idea no no no how are you saying that you were glad well under either system i'm glad that we can put it perps side because when the idea of monthly drop offs was suggested at first i thought it was going to replace curbside and i that i do actually and also with the worst with a cardboard when i cut it up i don't know if i stuffed up the cardboard in there and everything i would for there is there is positives and negatives to both types of collection and i mean in terms  of automated it keeps the streets cleaner because we get a lot of calls about littering yes and especially the lightweight plastic so that we keep it contained in it we keep it dry but then again the manual you can have is the price that were quoted for the curbside pick up predicated on the expectation that they'll be a certain amount of cardboard in the waste stream and if that waste stream if  cardboard was verted significantly two people bringing the cardboard say to the town yard with there being a possibly an adjustment upward on the recycling price because the recycling volume less valuable to market director of public works so there blended revenue share for how they figure out how they do their processing fee they have all the percentages based on averages an average will be charged to us based on the the average for the month so on average and any resident throughout the commonwealth has about sixty percent of their recycling is going to be some type of paper product one thousand point two as cardboard and forty one point six as all other paper so that is all part of their formula and we're not going to get every bit of cardboard that actually is in favor of them as well because they're not the process and so that's all part of the negotiations and we're talking about the do these extra collections of these special collections that we're talking about that we're doing right now ok well it doesn't make sense yeah just all i'm suggesting is that if the price is predicated on an expectation of some amount of cardboard or whatever the percentage is and then it turns out that let's take an extreme where people bring all of a cardboard to the yard once a month and and the content curbside is zero when they come back and say that the the recycling stream is not as valuable as we expected therefore we're going to charge you not forty five dollars a tonne but now some higher figure again i don't think they're getting a clean product a much they're getting the person project that they do these special dances only in their favor to do these around that's why or why i think i can comment the answer to your question is yes and if it occurs we won't do the cardboard pick up the d p w monthly but i also think we have to do this this value that we're giving out it's just not based on belmont it's based on because every single truck that's dropping off recycling so we're going to be put in and we have clean recycling but we're going to be put in with recycling from other towns that aren't as clean as we are so this is why this value it's not just belmont it's every then i have a second question which is just on the overall payback for going to automated so i i understood from the example that at least in the first couple of years you have to recover the cost of the containers and it looks like we really need seven years where you essentially breakeven by going automated but there after your it looks like you're ahead by roughly seventy thousand dollars a year by automated and i guess what i'm asking is realistically we're talking about a very long horizon that because of the life cycle is not just the seven years of the contract but i imagine what you're automated in the containers are out there you use them for another seven year cycle and so forth so you're actually talking about a gain of seventy thousand dollars or more well into the future so it's it doesn't seem accurate to say that automated is a breakeven actually when you take the long view of recycling over a more relevant horizon i think which you i have one question left and that is if before if we're under manual in this change hadn't taken place in the recycling would it would the collection of been  free that this is not a trick question so i would say possibly recycling is never well under our own contract we had a deal with them that they would pick up the recycling and they would keep the upside and we didn't pay for it is that that's pretty much the deal no correct i think than we are toward that would be to this the processing would be free as collecting is still pretty expensive collecting is still what expensive so we even now before we change the contract with them we're paying them to pick up the recyclables correct the prices that you saw in that estimated cost side that's just collection that doesn't include the process election just  correct but but it cost about as much to do that now you know yes well it's actually last but that we're talking about much older equipment there's a lot of dynamics that are involved in why we're paying less now with the current contract how much are we paying for collection now about four hundred and sixty thousand so this whole this this whole market change is resulting in say core two hundred fifty thousand maybe three hundred on the on a one point eight million dollar cost correct so what is that more than ten minutes impost it's like a fifteen percent increase we're looking at helped about fifteen percent on the recyclables and then the only way that an individual could control that we don't have any minimum recyclable tonnage to pick up right in other words we're doing likes i think i am i using the word like i want to stop that we're doing seven hundred tonnes a year in recyclables now we're doing close to sixteen we wouldn't pay for is that the idea and in other words it's based on tonnage no art as far as collection because it's based on stops it is oh so there is a stop charge that yeah they they look at how many onto wiley's that they would have to stop that and they charge accordingly so the four hundred thousand that we're paying now is essentially a stopped charge that is what i t's so when it comes to recycling and the stream aspect that we had part of our part of the marketing that russell got i should say are received or had the risk on that is part of their business plan and had that offset some of the true cost for collecting this is why i've been told that is why there's such a shift in the collection of recycling how is that there's no more value at the gate for the kind of the product so therefore they're charging us the full cost of the collection ok so even though we thought that they were picking up the entire benefit of the price of recycling they were filthy air time remember precinct six i am in favor of automated trash and manual recycling with the smaller bin and my impression is that preserves our options for the possibility that the market for changes ok it's a good point why the smaller bit it's just seems large the even the way that where you're not you're not talking about the like the sixty four hours is going to be for drives that's not under discussion ok we're doing the sixty four but i think your point is that if we if we do the manual pick up and keep the green boxes if the market goes back to difficult when you have a community doing single stream to go back to dual stream i don't know of anyone who has done that that's because you don't know floyd carbon well you our man has a utility knife and he cuts his cardboard  it in the little green things anyway so i'm not worried about that behavior but oh phil is saying is if the commodities have value again and if the market changes and if we the trucks that they're buying are for single stream recycling only so we are stuck with five years as many all single stream our army will see history credit five never had a processing fee so you would drop the paper off at the fiber where house and you would get rebated for that and then your comb your containers would go in with the rest of the always have a processing fee which will probably go up so the only way you can make money is if the markets get really good and your get a rebate so so we have no control over this is what i'm trying to tell in my presentation i have a september there there are i mean marybeth said that there are challenges with automated symmetry recycling and it is that is the i have no more room in my trash other stored into the ninety six container and off it goes but that is the reason why you are in the situation as a country with our contamination so people this stuff in the recycling of attraction  benefit of going to automate it's slightly less expensive over time over time it's easier because you don't have to have four containers forgot one big reason and mike's in torah remembered it rodents because everyone will have a lid on the recycling and a lid on the a trash that's applied that's a good easier it's it's easier to have one container the wheel out to the curb instead of i have that picture with the right not to understand but then three containers and it's it can be cumbersome to hassle the roller contin utilize them we don't have to buy containers the automated recycling of those trucks are those going to be the many ones going to be phased out of we going to be seeing a lot more automated trucks so if we go out to bed in five years the bids even going to be have a menu year five if the contract is up again they they will that'll be an option they'll ask do you want to convert to single stream because you could be saving x y z down the road or you ought to have some an automated you'll be saving x y z down the road  it's not as fast as trash because trash is typically a two person operation in a manual system or going to one and that's why we have are looking at considerable savings in trash even with the containers the return on the investment is the most needed for recycling is a different story and it's not realized until year eight and if the markets are favorable down the road we're always going to have a processing fee if the markets are bad or going to have a higher processing fee so that when we can control our cost or track on us automation that is the only way to control our cost we're never going to be doing that again and the small bins do blow around i do admit that they do get where those other we heard from the seniors pretty heavily that they didn't like the sixty four gallon containers i don't think they're going to like those i understand they're lighter bec recycling is lighter but they're still big if you've got a hill of a driveway me i've got a long flat driveway is easy for me but if you had a big hill you know i would rather but i rather carry out two containers than six yeah i would but you know it's easy for me to do i don't know it's container to basically he goes interviews the person and he makes the decision on the spot there's only a handful that he's issued in his two years  like i'm against that it will be a case by case basis the reason why i do say that all is that the barrels will be issued to the property the property could exchange hands or could you know be bought and sold three or four i know for sure i have many more benson and each of my bins has a lead so we don't have that the problem with with with infestation or or rain but i know for sure i'm not going to be able to fit my dish and all five what happens to those additional been that are labeled with a lead they're labeled recycling they're not going to get picked up because they don't they can't fit into the ninety six gallon are you are you saying to fill the ninety six and you're going to have five containers i thought no automated that if we want with automated we end up with one container why not only second to one recycling container to separate that's that blue container the blue one is great with colors or opposite just ignore the colors the larger one is the reason if i can't fit all my recycling into the larger one then i just don't set it out because i'll just wait another week or two weeks or with people do with them oh our sins of well because of the market and ways of markets a rigid plastics bulky rigid plastics and they're not collecting it anymore so i suggest you would use it for another purpose six right so in my case i realize we probably recycle more than most people but we are likely to have trouble fitting everything in there at once you had the paper and the cardboard in two weeks of  containers so you know if we hold it back then two weeks later we're just going to have even more so if i think it's going to be a challenge if it's just for us we'll deal with it but i'm wondering if they d s m audits that they did did they give you any sense on the quality of birth cycles that an average house had and how often the ubi can pass the constraint on this to give us comfort that it's not likely a problem for most  people i'm going to use my recollection and it's not one hundred percent but i think basically it was around forty eight gallons average that was the average so of course some people going to have more and some people that have less cycling as competitive in our neighborhood we have two green vents but we don't buy cans of coke anymore you know because you have to recycle  them we also buy wine in the boxes because you have to recycle the glass so i think you know there's controls on the other side too it's not you know recycling is nice but it doesn't mean that you know there's a free a free lunch to buy containers that need to be recycled and then you need one hundred gallon containers to do it every two weeks so you know there's things like cardboard can be managed glass can be so i wish i had a contract to science and i but we are we are not ready yet so as soon as the contract is signed then they will order their come in which is about five months out they understand that that is not going to happen on july one so they will be a phased in approach probably starting and of the summer beginning of the fall that being said in that time we will be we have been talking with the potential vendor  belmont day recycling events having barrels everywhere army barrels everywhere education p s a's sounds like you want to do a commercial in this to pull off so we are we