Editor’s note: This article is by Matt Hongoltz-Hetling, of the Valley News, in which it was first published June 28, 2015.
“Nobody really knows what’s going to happen when this goes into effect on July 1,” Todd Allen, the chairman of Hartford’s Solid Waste Advisory Committee, told town leaders earlier this month. “It’s a little bit of uncharted waters.”
Allen was talking about a rapidly approaching deadline under Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law, a radical rethinking of how solid waste is handled throughout the state that is expected to be particularly painful.
One of the many unknowns is how, or even if, the law will be enforced against wayward trash haulers, who must begin to accept recycling and charge customers by the volume of their nonrecyclable trash — a system known as pay-as-you-throw.
Individual households, meanwhile, will be required to separate recyclable materials such as plastic, glass, cardboard, tin and paper from the waste stream.
Also on July 1, transfer stations that take trash must begin accepting leaf and yard debris; companies that produce between 52 and 104 tons of organic waste per year must begin composting that material; and municipalities must begin providing recycling containers alongside trash containers in public spaces.
Proponents of the law, Act 148, say it will achieve a major legislative goal — keeping as much trash as possible out of landfills and reclaiming whatever is reusable.
Towns and members of the solid waste industry are concerned about unintended consequences, such as increased roadside dumping and trash-burning. They also fret that small haulers will be forced to go out of business, and some small towns of the Upper Valley could be stranded without any solid waste service.
Solid Waste Showdown
With nearly $500 million in annual revenues and 170,000 business, municipal and residential customers in the Northeast, Casella Waste Systems is by far the largest hauler of solid waste in the area.
Beginning on July 1, Act 148 requires Casella and all of its smaller competitors to pick up recyclables in addition to trash for all residential customers. Haulers are not allowed to charge a separate fee for recyclables, and must instead bundle any price increases into the existing garbage pickup rates.
Jim Toher, Casella’s area manager, said the cost of sending one truck into a town such as Vershire is already barely supported by the fee system, and that sending a second truck to pick up recyclable material would be cost-prohibitive.
A week before the July 1 deadline, he had no solution in hand.
Toher said the law should recognize that some residents recycle by driving their cans and cardboard to a local transfer station. Those customers, he said, should be allowed to opt out of the mandatory recycling pickup.
“I don’t think the state wants to be in a position, nor does business want to be in a position, where they have to bill the customer for services they don’t use,” Toher said.
If the Agency of Natural Resources declines to allow some sort of exemption, Casella may have to start dropping service to small towns, Toher said.
State Rep. Jim Masland, D-Thetford, said the problem could leave rural communities without access to trash haulers.
“My concern is that the houses on the back roads might not get services at all anymore, because the haulers may not want to go there,” he said.
Cathy Jamieson, who is overseeing the implementation of the new law on behalf of Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources, said she didn’t have any specific knowledge of a request from Casella, but allowing customers to opt out isn’t legal.
“That’s basically the system we have today,” she said. “That’s not really allowed in the way the law is crafted.”
Towns or groups of towns can apply for an exemption, Jamieson said, but they have to demonstrate they are offering an alternative system that’s convenient for residents, and has a recycling rate similar to those in towns that don’t have exemptions.
Margaret Cheney, one of three sponsors of Act 148 when she represented Norwich, Strafford, Sharon and Thetford as a Democrat in the Vermont House, said that haulers should have figured out a game plan by now. The legislation passed in 2012.
The Upper Valley Gap
When it comes to improving the state’s solid waste infrastructure, some areas are needier than others, with the roughly two dozen towns on the Vermont side of the Upper Valley among the neediest, according to a February report to the Legislature from the Solid Waste Infrastructure Advisory Committee.
The infrastructure is made up of all the containers and
trucks and processing facilities that help people get trash from point A to point B. Or, when the trash has some sort of value and point B is a landfill, infrastructure helps people get waste to points C through Z, which might be a pulp-processing center that accepts used newspapers, an anaerobic digester that produces energy from rotting meat, or a factory that will melt down aluminum cans.
The report’s authors found that the Upper Valley has some problems.
Ted Siegler, a partner at Windsor-based DSM Environmental Services, and one of the report’s authors, said the Upper Valley lacks single-stream transfer stations that can get those recyclables to Rutland or Williston. The only facility on the Vermont side of the Upper Valley that has the capacity to handle those recyclables is in White River Junction; there’s another in Newport, N.H., he said.
Making matters worse, or at least more costly, the large distance between the Upper Valley and Rutland adds to the price of processing those materials.
That makes small towns in the Upper Valley even less attractive to haulers.
In Strafford, Selectman Steve Marx and Selectboard Chairman John Freitag say that the new law has already cost them a recycling hauler, and could cost them the services of one of the only private trash haulers — Durkee Rubbish Removal, run by owner and operator Debbie Clark — that comes to the area to pick up trash from Strafford households.
For the past 15 years, the town has helped to subsidize Durkee’s services by paying about $4,000 per year to help offset disposal fees. The arrangement made sense, Freitag said, because Strafford is so remote and sparsely populated — about 1,100 people over 44 square miles — that it costs haulers more to serve area residents.
Marx and Freitag said Strafford also has a recycling program with an 80 percent participation rate, at an annual cost of about $6,500.
But this year their recycling hauler decided not to renew the contract, a decision Freitag said was due to a combination of new requirements and a nosedive in the market for many recyclable materials. They anticipate the replacement contractor will cost between $13,000 and $16,000 for the year, and to pay for that, they’ve decided to stop subsidizing Durkee’s services.
Freitag said Durkee has asked its customers to bring recylables to the town’s recycling center, where it will park its truck on Saturdays. Whether that system is legal under Act 148 is debatable.
“We think it is,” Marx said. “The state doesn’t know. Our legislators don’t know. We’ll see what happens.”
Pay As You Legislate
Cheney said she’s proud of Act 148, which addresses critical issues facing Vermont — stagnant recycling rates, and landfills that were rapidly running out of room. Vermont has only one active landfill, which is operated by Casella in Coventry (another landfill was considered, but never opened, in Hartland). While she expressed sympathy for haulers and communities that are struggling, the consequences of inaction would be much worse.
“There’s basically one working landfill in Vermont. Something had to be done,” she said. “People who run the Chittenden Solid Waste District, they’ve been making it work.”
But Freitag said lawmakers aren’t being thoughtful or reasonable.
“It’s easy to pass a law. It’s harder to make something impractical work,” he said. “What they have to realize is the state is not Chittenden County. What works in Chittenden County is not applicable, many times, to small rural towns in the rest of Vermont.”
One recurring criticism of the bill is that lawmakers didn’t provide funding to address the infrastructure needs, or to help ease the pain of transition for local governments, waste districts and private haulers.
Statewide, the cost to bring the infrastructure up to speed is estimated at $45 million, with $15 million of that going to new trucks and containers that will be needed this year, according to the report. Siegler said lawmakers erred by not considering the funding question.
Cheney said she was not aware of any funding issues when the bill was crafted in 2012.
When DSM Environmental Services wrote the report, Siegler said he thought he was identifying a need that would be addressed.
“When we looked at what those costs are, we made the assumption the Legislature was going to substantially increase funding to help meet the requirements of Act 148,” he said, “and that has not happened.”
State grants could be given to municipalities, waste districts or private companies to subsidize the costs of new facilities and equipment, he said.
Masland, who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, said the infrastructure needs are real, but that the solution is unlikely to come in the form of a $45 million check written from the cash-strapped state.
“ I think what we collectively understood is that there wasn’t an expectation all of that money would come from the state,” Masland said.
Industry and municipalities that provide trash services will bear at least some of the costs, Masland said, and they will likely trickle down to households in the form of higher user fees and property taxes.
Siegler said the need for funding won’t go away.
“The Legislature is going to have to come back and review that issue,” he said.
The Vermont League of Cities and Towns has asked for five changes to the bill, including the elimination of the organics recycling mandate that kicks in for all residents in 2020.
In April, a VLCT legislative bulletin accused state lawmakers of inaction.
“What has the legislature done to address the need for flexibility particularly in small rural parts of the state?” it asked. “Nothing.”
Earlier this year, Masland introduced a bill into the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee that he said would allow customers of haulers that pick up less than 3,000 pounds of trash per day to certify that they are utilizing other recycling options. The bill, like a handful of others that seek to amend the law, was not acted on.
Masland said that, once the deadline passes, public sentiment will dictate what happens moving forward.
“It will depend on what happens in July and August and September,” he said. “It depends on how much pushback there is.”
Steve Jeffrey, the VLCT’s executive director, said towns that provide municipal trash pickup face a particular challenge.
Such towns generally fund trash service as a line item in the municipal budget. But because those who pick up trash are now required to differentiate between households that produce a lot of trash and those that generate less, the funding method has to be completely revised.
Consumer Compliance
The new law is predicated on the idea that making recycling mandatory, cost-effective and convenient for residents will increase the recycling rate in Vermont and make the state cleaner and more environmentally friendly.
More than half of the waste that goes into Vermont’s landfills is made up of recyclable materials or organics.
The Agency of Natural Resources has been working to get the word out to everyone concerned.
“We want to get the word out to people to let them know were trying to make recycling as convenient as possible,” Jamieson said.
Cheney anticipates that the economics of pay-as-you-throw will create a dramatic change in resident behavior.
“It’s a classic consumer incentive economic model where it costs you more to do the undesirable things which is just add to the waste,” she said. “It should cost you little or nothing to divert recyclables so they can be reused. That was the goal.”
