Municipal Recycling Programs

Over my time at RIRRC, I had the opportunity to work with Kristin, the Municipal Coordinator. Every municipality has a their own recycling policy and program. Per state law, cities and towns have the goal of reaching a 35% recycling rate and a 50% diversion rate. This is a feat that only Middletown has reached, no other municipality has reached both of those rates.

I learned more than I could have ever imagined in my time with Kristin. In this time I learned about the various recycling programs from pay as you throw, to automated cart collection, to transfer stations. Each plan meets the needs of the community that it serves. To get a better feel for what these programs are like we visited the people who run them (the recycling coordinators or the towns DWP clerk).

We traveled to Richmond to visit Scott from the DWP and toured their transfer station. This is a rustic transfer station built right next to the old town landfill (as many transfer stations or DPW yards are). Here there is a scale for the cars and trucks to weigh in and out on when they bring trash so that they are billed appropriately. There are also separate areas for commercial waste disposal as well as municipal waste disposal. We even got to meet their friend Tres (the three legged cat) that lives in the DPW building!

We traveled to Woonsocket to tour their recycling center. They have everything here! You can bring bulky plastic, extra mixed recycling that did not fit into your cart, clean mattress to be recycled, a share shed where you can leave items in good condition for people to take to use, etc... All of this is in one place for their residents to utilize!

We traveled to Newport and Middletown in the same day. In Newport, we met Dawn, the DPW clerk that was put in charge of their recycling program Clean City. Kristin was in charge of the Clean City program for her time in Newport, so we went to see what was different. After the meeting with Dawn, we went to Second Beach in Middletown to meet with Will, their recycling coordinator. Will went into detail about their pay-as-you-throw program and their bulky-waste tags. He credits this as to why they have meet the goal of the 35% recycling and 50% diversion rate.

Aside from learning specifically about the various municipal recycling programs, I was able to learn about the grant writing policy in regards to the municipal grant policy. Kristin and I worked on rewriting the grant policy for two solid days, reworking the policy. Currently as it stands, the Municipal Grant states that a municipality is eligible to apply for one of the two grant cycles per year, for a 50/50 match with RIRRC granting up to $5000. In the new grant policy, we proposed that there will be no cap for the municipalities and that they should be able to apply for as many grant rounds that are held per year. This would still include the 50/50 match. These proposals will go to the Board on Wednesday, June 27, 2018. If they pass it, it will go into affect immediately, in time for the first grant round that begins on August 1. This was a very beneficial because it exposed me to a process that I had never had the change to work on before.

Overall, going on these visits and working with Kristin on the daily in's and out's of the recycling programs in RI was very informational and gave me a much better understanding of recycling across RI.

Here are some photos of my visit from Richmond: