this now since two thousand and one and i have worked on several really interesting patients fro transitions with a number of different communities hamilton are both curbside communities and i worked with them over the course of about seven years doing several different phases and you'll see more about that later on wayland in action or both drop off communities that went to pay should throw and bucks for it was a drop off community that i'm working with now so today i'm going to try to tailor this to a curbside community and talk a little bit about just generic things about patients throw just to make sure everybody's on the same page using the same language but then try to get to what is it that residents can do in terms of what are the options and how can you help your community so and in terms of what's left in the trash we're already doing a pretty good job of recycling but we're only recycling let's say thirty five percent of our trash and so every year or every other year the state has a waste characterization study done at the incinerators to find out what's left what are we capturing and that's what's left and it's still sixty percent of what's left could still be treated in one way or another other than trash it could be electronics recycling it could be paper recycling metal glass organics recycling c m d all of those categories are all things that there  recycled absolutely everything and had a place to put the organics just like korea found in the school we would be down to a whole lot less and this is not just pie in the sky i just i want to reaffirm what her findings showed because she said and over done this and i've been involved in that school and they've set it up very similar to how you did it i went in on a random day spot check to see how much there was left in the trash after you took the liquids the tray the food  very much a can to like your utility bill your gas bill your electric bill you call it waste metering it's in that same vein you pay for the amount that you use and i think it it's helpful for me to think about how do we get stuck here we're in this really awkward point in time we're somehow we have trash buried in literally buried in our taxes and it's it's invisible to the taxpayer there's no independent pricing like in our electric bill how do we get here it's and we're bad and i've been complaining you know if you're in the hardest position you're trying to do two things at once you're trying to take traffic out of the tax bill and you're trying to convert to pay as you throw i think your first step is going to be the hardest one the communities that i worked with where they already have a sticker fee for their drop off program like a winchester a and wailing where you have to pay to go to the transfer station because you through it's not that hard because they're already paying outside of the property taxes but you guys have it buried in the taxes why don't we have that we have it because if you think back when i was picking over a hundred years ago trash was entirely different as mostly organic it was grown locally it wasn't shipped from all over the place there wasn't much packaging it went into a hole in the ground the hole in the ground everybody's town was in a swamp right you look at the border of every town where the river is that's where the transfer station is every single town i can tell right where the transfer station is going to be a drive to the town to go down there's a swamp yet there's a transfer station and that made sense because it was mostly organic it was kind of like composting it was early composting it didn't have a lot of packaging but then in the sixty's all of a sudden we started getting all these new cool packages and people realized oh well that shouldn't go in the swamp let's start recycling so we started recycling and we started all these recycling programs but then we also got really clever right after world war two it started out in chemicals and let's hope we're sticking this stuff in the in the swamp and it's going in the river and that's not so good so that's one of the e p a got a large and started closing landfills and all of our communities all around the boston area each had a landfill once upon a time and so it was in our home town it was cheap it was owned by the town that's where the financing structure came from it used to be that it was cheap and local and it made sense to get everybody to not bury it in their own backyards not burn it in their own barrels but come put it in this boat sanitary landfill then we closed landfills we built them  incinerators they are not local they are not cheap and we did not change the financing structure through still got a nine hundred sixty s financing structure with a twenty first century incinerator program and so that's why we're in this awkward spot we haven't really grappled with that problem so patients roche is a way to kind of signal to residents that trash has a cost now it didn't in the past necessarily but it does now and as a financial incentive to produce less trash recycle more and those other communities across the country across the state where there are patients for programs and i would say most of the western masses drop off communities and so again it was kind of an easier sell for them than it is for you guys it's also called you know based pricing variable rate pricing volume based green bag we tried we will learn the hard way that pay as you throw starts off with a really bad connotation and even the acronym p a white t it's not really smart marketing so we've been trying to rebrand ourselves as save money and reduce trash that's smart so when you us when you see smart now you'll know what it is everybody else is grabbing on to smart too but anyway basically it works because there are backs and steve will talk a little bit more about backs but usually the basic principle is that there are some fixed costs of the operation like in the curbside community the truck has to drive around every street stop in every house we consider that a fixed cost so there's some fixed cost and then you don't know how much people are going to generate that's a variable cost so we try to create a bad price so that it covers the variable cost and we try to find some other way to cover the fixed cost and that's either through a fee sometimes have a fee to cover the fixed costs or through property taxes so here's the four basic types of pay as you throw programs try to capture the graphically one is let's say i think what's an example an overall has an annual fee they might be a couple hundred dollars for an annual fee and every bit of trash goes into a back that you have to pay for the bag has a fee to do so one hundred percent of your budget for trash is now transferred out of your property taxes and covered by fees and that kind of community option too and there's an annual fee but for the annual fee you get your first barrel free so that's a little bit like lol lol has an annual fee but they give every resident a barrel and if that barrel isn't enough then you buy the bag on top ok so that's a fee for the first barrel and if you needed then there's a few people buy the bags most people can get by with their third variation is like booster wester no fee no barrels given out everybody everybody trash goes in a back and forth variation no annual fee first fare all free this is the one that's most like what you have now is the taxes paid the equivalent of the fixed cost the taxes pay for everybody's first barrel and only if you need to go beyond that first barrel do you buy that so that's kind of the fourth v reduction of fifty percent of their trash you can kind of see the dark creates a light green and the recycling stepped up and it's actually it's not just and it doesn't just bounce down the bounce back up it bounces down and stays down this is another example shrewsbury is a curbside community they saw thirty two percent less trash immediately as a result of their program and ran went th rough a couple of different iterations so they started with unlimited trash like many of us went to a first feral free whatever barrel you happened to have in the garage was supposed to be thirty five gallon but i don't know if it was for easier for ius like our caller still picked it up and so they're supposed to be buying overflow bags but not so many people really did and so they redid it and they went to thirty five gallon standardized carts for trash and ninety six gallon carts for recycling so huge difference and when they initially went to pay as you throw their trash went down about thirty two percent when they went to automated patients right with a standardized barrel it went down another six percent just because it kind of cut out the people who are pushing the envelope a little bit and so their budget was in help both times significantly even though they they actually went to an automated system which is sometimes you think oh well fancy a truck that's going to cost more but they save some money there hamilton also unlimited trash once upon a time who again the first barrel for a pick your own choice of a first barrel then they went this is kind of the the ultimate program they went to a patient throw thirty five gallon barrel standardized barr curbside weekly organics recycling and curbside weekly single stream recycling so and actually in the first iteration this is not where they are that are now because their first caller went bankrupt but the a lot the first generation actually was trashed every other week and if you can't make it for two weeks then you have to do the pay as you throw back so it was kind of a hybrid between first bell free every other weekend in between pages throw they then lost that whole or got another one there was no financial incentive for the hall or for some reason to do that so they went back to weekly trash pickup but they're there again a thirty five gallon barrel so that's  that's the barrel on the right and the little green one is there again it's in the recycling and their results over the years they've gone sort of from three thousand to twelve hundred over these different steps in terms of total sorry solid waste very little acronyms for myself until i was fill out sorry so what can you expect in dollars from the benefits it really depends on where you start and i know your starting used to be the last time i worked with this committee we were talking about ten thousand households and ten thousand tonnes so good for you no longer ten thousand times i would descend from ten thousand tonnes you might have been able to see a fifty percent reduction and you've done pretty well and you've got me down to one of the metrics we've come to look at  d i think kim talked about this we talk now about what's what's left in the trash rather than the recycling rate and how many tons are there in the trash and how many people are contributing to those tons and so we talk about tons per household or pounds per household and i sort of always picked on belmont when i talk to other communities because you were such a handy dandy number ten thousand households ten thousand times that was one now you're point seven five so if you took all the residents of your you maybe one of the few towns where that would work but there are many towns where they do not pick up from the high rises and the condos so if you took all the residents and all of the town then you know like in my town we only pick up to six family we don't pick up any other part of complexes any of the multi family houses so we the reason we do it on the basis of household survey actually that's the probably the word i left out was not total households but the households served by the program so i think that one of the things that i often get asked is ok so if the trash goes down twenty five percent of the and it goes down like a thousand times how come the recycling doesn't go up by a thousand times so my colleagues and i are trying to come up with a number of answers to that question because traditionally if i see trash time is going down i see recycling going up by a quarter to a third of that so if it goes down by thousand tons it goes up recycling goes up by two hundred fifty to three hundred  tons of recyclables and why it is that people find that if they have to pay for trash a lot of the stuff that they threw out will have it's clothing they can find clothes in drop box there's an awful lot of demand for clothing just as rags it doesn't need to be pristine it can be used as insulation who run a car that you know padding and things like that it might be electronics or a lot of good places to get rid of electronics if you make a little bit of effort and might be perfectly good household goods and there's an awful lot of charities that  homeless people or give people got burned out of their homes or just starting over again and even they might want to picture they might knees and pottery they might need a base home so all of a sudden people are now incentivized through patient throw to fund to make that effort to find other ways to do the donations the other big factor is composting if you if you've ever been to what i was not a composter and then you start composting you realize what a big difference it makes in your trash and it's similar to what the schools found it it doesn't look like a lot but it weighs a lot and it makes a huge difference so back your compost being perks like composting donation recycling your yard waste all of those things come into play and that's why not a full time  started selling the bags and everybody was going to buy their milk in the little stores now the pics are spot on board so now we don't have the problem of the big stores are all they get will do this and we've been doing it now across the state for the last fifteen sixteen twenty years and i don't think there's more than two or three places where there's any surcharge charged or allowed by anybody most retailers take a two dollar bag and they charge two dollars for it and they it's just a service and they're thrilled by the traffic and they're happy to have you as a customer and so usually you can get local grocery stores sometimes hardware convenience stores they don't charge a markup and comes by he's got open the lid a seat ok yellow jacket on black bag and leave that behind so you can still use your barrels or not if you're using that kind of program or even better if you have a standardized program with a standardized barrel this just shows that most of the programs in massachusetts are bad programs there were a few programs with just putting stickers on and for a while i thought that was a great idea until i heard all the d p w say there is such a pain every day or rains every days knows every day is cold some resident ca snow really cool and after six months of that nobody wants stickers anymore so i have a large scale version of this over here if you want to get up close and personal but this is our house for household map overlaid with pages you throw so you can kind of see the cross hatching is where there's a pay as you throw program or smart program and most of the green communities which have the least amount of traffic for households are pages road and most of the red communities are not page three so it is a direct correlation common concerns are illegal dumping so little whereas illegal dumping found is going to be found either in an a condo dumpster or a school dumpster a town dumpster or in the woods right but it's amazing that people do not really plan ahead to illegally dump so they take their trash and they put it in someplace illegally and then sneak away if it's in the dumpster and it's not a big deal of the usually they'll just get picked up there but if it's dumped in the woods or a dump like we've had on the town hall steps on occasion just to make a statement miraculously if you open it up there's a piece of mail in there did not think ahead and it does not take very many times for the police to show up with your trash and say i don't want to see this again before they get the message and as soon as you had a couple of those posted in the local paper and people realize the word gets around the they are actually going to enforce this they are going to open up the bag and find what's in it they are going to trace it back to you and they're going to embarrass you work it's around and it stops i think the other thing that's happened is that you know in the town i've worked with the town officials like in hamilton and well and we just reset the town managers down have them sit in turn sit down all the department heads and say we cannot afford to have you be illegal dumping in our town and at the fire she catches any of those firemen police she catches any of this policeman school principal catches any of the teachers bringing trash and dropping it off a school dumpster that's not allowed in and once that's messages out there right at the beginning very early on it doesn't happen i think you know it could sneak around the edge but very few people would risk their job for a two dollar bag really this one's a hard one perception of a tax a lot of people say it's in my taxes now if you take it out of my taxes it's double taxation i'm i'm yes i'm taking it out of the taxes but everybody in town will tell you where you're probably going to raise our taxes anyway because we've got twelve other priorities in town about schools and other you know open a lot of other things that we need to cover your taxes are not going to go down they might go up a little less fast but you are deathly going to see any additional charge i just want to equip you with one little tidbit of information towns like yours and like mine are in a shrinking minority of towns that are still trying to pay for trash out of their property taxes about three quarters of the state either has pay as you throw or trash he or combination or the within that twenty five percent there is even some who get if you see that the tax funded with trash limits so out of the twenty five percent green there there's at least a trash limit you can only put out a sixty four gallon barrel you can only put out three bags as opposed to unlimited the tax funded no limits is a level percent so that's you tax funded no limits across the state eleven percent of the communities in the state of massachusetts have no limit on the trash and it's coming out of your taxes everybody else has found either a way to limit it or have a fee for it or have patience for a program and so if you don't have money to  this encourages recycling and what i like about it is that it really puts the residents in charge he's not mandating anything it's for those people who have a busy life and can't be bothered just buy a box of fags and put them in the cupboard and use as many bags as you want at least you're paying your way if you want to make sure you don't overspend on trash and recycle and donate and compost and you'll get down to very minimal cost but it's up to you it's a very free market kind of program i want to kind of talk about what other communities have done to try to move patients throw into the discussion and i use act as a good example mostly because i wasn't at all involved and i sat back and watched and they did a great job and what they did do was kind of follow this they a group of like sustainability group about pickets got together went to their community leaders the d p w the town manager of the selectmen and said if we can put together a political campaign that brings support for this program will you were adopted and basically they said yes if you can get a non binding vote at the town meeting and acted then we will support it and they were willing to be vocal enough about this said we see this is a perfectly logical thing to do a perfectly reasonable equitable program has never been the point out they had the advantage of being a drop off community where they were looking at possibly paying three hundred dollars for the sticker to get into the transfer station so it was already of the taxes so they drop their sticker fee to one hundred everybody felt good about that and they  two hundred dollars to play with the buybacks and i thought oh i can do that no problem so granted that was a lot easier sell than what you're looking at but then i would make sure you work with the local officials mary beth j to make sure that you're marketing one thing clearly with all the right details and then think of it as a political campaign it's you know you need lawn signs you need precinct captains you need phone banking you need all of that you can't turn out people but you have a organization a private company in the government tell you pretty much the same thing and to me that sends a powerful message that it's not like we're coordinating it's not like we're working together we happen to work in the same space but we agree on the same approaches we agree on the same strategies we agree on on the same data we have some minor very minor disagreements on some terms some ways of calculating things but we are very much on the same page so where are we today providence rhode island's oral roberts reading has a no been no barrel program that if you don't recycle we don't take your trash but in that instance technical compliance is easy i put one can in my recycling and then that's considered recycling and then my trash gets collected so even where there is in forced mandatory recycling it's still largely a request and then what happens is we refer to it as a blank check but you can't that government has no influence over the cost people are throwing away what they for a way and they just simply pay for the results of that are pretty stark so carolyn looked at the state wide waste characterization study i looked at the ways characterization study for the incinerator that t are the results the proportions are remarkably close and and see if you read if your trash is representative of the stuff that's going into the incinerator what would that be for you where you'd be looking at spending about the two thousand five hundred dollars disposing of food waste you'd be spending textiles as carolyn was talking about over thirty thousand dollars a year throwing away reusable sweaters throwing away jeans throw away things that could become carpet padding or go to goodwill thirty two thousand of your dollars going to that purpose and you can see through out what it looks like but you're spending about two hundred twenty four thousand dollars a year to throw away items that we know how to recycle today and by the way this is the way sterilizations those are broken into sixty four categories of material i only look at stuff that i know there's a market for so high grade office paper magazines newspapers are in paper but other more borderline paper products are out same with plastic so this is this is pretty if the back of beyond little holes to pretty good representation of what you can do with that forty six point forty eight point six percent of material that folks today are throwing in the trash that really shouldn't be going  what causes all this as karen was mentioning a system of perverse incentives water and electricity we don't think about it because we look at things from today's perspective water and electricity both pre dated meterin technology water's a public utilities thousands of years old ancient romans had it and electricity existed for a number of years before we could meter it metering technology for both came in roughly around just before the civil war and you can go back  the towns that have good records and look at the fight that there was we're not going to meter water that's terrible it's a terrible idea why would we do so or electricity before everybody paid the same every household paid its should fair fair share of water or electricity and when we needed water and we needed electricity what we found is about just over a thirty percent reduction in usage of water or electricity when we needed it now people are dying of dehydration because we need water people are living in the dark because we need electricity and these are concerns you will hear if the town considers a program people going to work humiliate their trash they want people it's it's going to create all sorts of problems it won't we'll talk about the one thousand one hundred other communities that have done it and sort of tried a path that you can rely upon but with water with electricity what we learned is if you meter it you reduce waste you reduce the cost for everybody because there's less waste and then it's fair because people are paying for with the years and a measure that we one of the things that we like to look at is say would anybody go back as karen said i want to pay all let's just split the electricity fairly i have a big garden in my house i would love for the whole my whole town to pay a proportionate share of water because then my trees would be incredibly abundant but i pay my own water by what happened also be an environmentalist so i wouldn't do that but the point is when people pay their fair share they make better decisions take the food in in your instance the taxes and you can lower the taxes take the cost out of texas stop trying to manage it for people and allow people to manage that cost themselves and when you give people the ability to manage their costs themselves lo and behold as we find with water electricity and most other things they do a remarkably better job of managing it that we try to manage it centrally for them and by the way just as it was to set the background i spent fifteen years as a city in town manager in massachusetts when i say we actually do mean me i have proposed created throw successfully and unsuccessfully in different communities and so we do try to manage it and help reduce trash increase or cycling but when given tools for residen even better job than we can do when we're trying to help so with the patient role model you lower the taxes or the fees allow people to pay for the cost of the service by the bag and then what you see is recycling goes up dramatic so what happens if we go first off the mechanics of it so residents go by town trash bags at the store shop today carolyn mentioned booster it's one hundred forty three stores and district sell the banks every supermarket every hardware store the corner store there are some secure some former gas stations that turned into a gas station close well it was some cigarettes now they sell the bags the bags are available anywhere people shop because you don't want the bags to be left of availability of banks to be a problem  for folks so residents have the same at the curb experience communities that are curbside don't need to change their communities that a transfer station don't need to change if you're automated that can stay the same if you're seventy automated if you're just a loose bag on a curb whatever your existing system is doesn't have to change you may want to change it you may do the change at same time of it doesn't have to change the experience is the same but instead of putting up a hefty bag of the glad bag you just put out the towns pick your color as long as it's not red trash back orange blue purple green whatever calling one and because people are incentivized to reduce trash the town saves money the cost of disposal goes down rather significant so today when people look at pages throw programs they say well i generate three bags of trash i'm i going to throw away three bags of trash no you're not because the way the program works are going to reduce your trash pretty significantly what we have found when we've done on street measurements is about a two thirds reduction in trash bag usage for two reasons one people recycle more and they start switching the trash so where you have three bags a week you drop to one so when you're thinking about what my cost under this program will be remember what you're generating today cut that in half or cut that by more and that's typically what you're looking at so we find people who are doing ten or twelve added pressure week a month we'll get down to about four or and i don't have a pricing incentive page throw it to carol's point there's a lot in the trash that doesn't really need to be if you pay attention to so from the town perspective how the program works is they do hire a vendor to manufacture and distribute the bags you can just manufacture the bags and distribute them you're sick yourself of the city if the town wants to but then you get a shipping of two million bags worth your case like this is worth six hundred dollars that has to sit d p w you hope it doesn't burn down your butt secure properly most communities your size will have somebody distribute it for you and handle the accounting and shipping and receiving and all that stuff also a town hire a firm to handle all that stuff in the hall or be instructed to only collect the town's back so if your bags are orange it would be the have found in the enforcement programs we've done is the vast majority of time in force which is government notices so many people say the lack of make my elated well you don't actually have to do that what we found is about eighty percent of the time when you send somebody a letter actually it's entirely present but when you just send them a letter or send them a note that you noticed the bag was wrong they don't do it again even if you call them that you don't have to leave the bag behind if you know if the resident knows you noticed they don't do it again why because everybody knows at the back end of anon a fork of a violation notice from the government is was to find somewhere right or somebody to go to court so you don't actually have to find people you have to let them know you noticed and people self correct with the side you get the community gets to choose the side of the size of the bag most towns are the vast majority of towns and art that we work with choose to bag sizes so thirty or thirty three i'll have a bunch here if you want to take a look at them and that twelve to fifteen tall kitchen backsides a number of cities have gone two or three bag offering where you have the thirty to thirty three to twelve fifteen and a seven or eight gallon so called senior bad for people who generate very very little then the town receives this big bag sales revenue so if the bags are two dollars each that goes into the town it can be appropriated for any valid municipal purpose some communities look to return that money directly to residents some say fifteen so this is supper for the information so cities and towns many of them reporting from asia to the department of environmental protection on their salt wasting recycling generation in two thousand and fifteen non asian girl communities generated six hundred sixty five pounds of trash per capita served a year we use the per capita measure not to her household measure this is one of the areas where the movie and we disagree because the swing of number of people perhaps sold in massachusetts is fairly significant lawrence people per household and their communities in the cape that are below two and so we look at it as a per person measure to start adjusting for that understanding this carol mentioned there is a flight to that which is you're not factoring in the necessarily factoring apartments correctly so we look at the piece numbers and our numbers they both have strengths they both have weaknesses neither are perfect but we use them both as a guide but not a stroke user generated six hundred sixty pounds of trash per capita per year overflow programs which is like a sixty four gallon cart the store cart with an overflow bag on top is six hundred sixty pounds per person per year so it's not really different overall now some of those grow some of those communities like the city of land started around nine hundred pounds per person per year and then dropped just to something closer to six cities so it all sort of is important words aren't the average of all asia throw communities in massachusetts is community of program to do in belmont when you give the bag revenue back that's all those are all subsequent decisions but the policy decision to have people pay for trash directly by that if you  the average up to be a twenty seven percent reduction in trash just by dropping to the average your patients or you're doing better than on a pro communities so i don't know that it's fair for you to go from for us to think you'll go for better to just average your off your outperforming the average already today so i think you would probably do better than a twenty seven percent reduction if you did the average reduction of the average community that we work with it is a bag base patient or a program not the tax not the cards but a bag based program is a forty four percent reduction a thirty four year languages spoken in the schools all the hills all the issues of having nine colleges high trains in population with fifty percent of renters move in any given year all those things that are oftentimes considered challenges from a solid waste standpoint they're down where you could be at forty four percent reduction waveland is doing better so there are still a number of communities of oh that three hundred twenty five pounds per capita number now when by i'm looking at your numbers i'm assuming a twenty five percent reduction so not even getting you to the average recycling programs terrific not the purpose of my portion of this question i'm a huge fan of them but we reason we don't look at recycling rates is because the town i live in has about a fifty percent recycling rate but it's also in the top nine percent of trash generators aggressed uses which are a huge amount of trash and a huge amount of recycling that's not where we want to be where we want to be is a low amount of trash that really  infilling incinerating in paying for and hopefully a good amount of her cycle so soon this is just a sense of where other communities in massachusetts were last year carolyn mentioned of where is that where the trash shows we look at  across the communities we work with where we find it is again as carol mentioned when a thousand tons of trash is reduced with paged through a program it's not all going into recycling for your senator goes into what we call b municipal program you're not municipal program doesn't capture all recycling today you have to drop boxes for textiles as an example you have reuse and you have other forms of recycling and waste your question aren't hatcher today in your figures so forty percent will go in twenty five percent of it is or games typically organics that will find a new home so leaves and grass which is still in the trash how do we know because when we go into the incinerators and we open up the trash trucks we see leasing grass and not nearly as much as connecticut which doesn't ban them or maine that doesn't but we're so we're doing substantially better there but some people so putting twenty percent over him says carol mentioned electronics donations to charity ten percent is source reduction people making better decisions and that a very very small percentage is the commercial just it's being imported today that the taxpayers are paying for that people are dumping in their useful trash so just a couple notes on this as carol mentioned some communities do it's a small percentage of them and if they put in a circuit breaker program for seniors or people of low income that will give a free bag a week or overdue or somehow reduce the financial impact for folks those things are possible when you decide you want to do a patient through program now the question is how and how much patience those not about how much that's a subsequent decision but there are certain breakers that can be put in place to help people pay the cost automated collection that would if you would chief substantially similar results our data is limited because there are relatively few communities that have both automated and bad patient row bags in them but it's it's one or two percent less effective but still highly  so with that i am done i would be happy to answer any questions on the program the operations the finances