Making a fine mess

One neighborhood’s failure to recycle properly may soon be costly for South Portland residents

SOUTH PORTLAND — Because of problems in a single neighborhood, South Portland is on the verge of fining all residents who fail to recycle properly.

Changes to the city’s garbage and refuse ordinance, scheduled for a first reading before the City Council “sometime in March,” would assess fines ranging from $250 to $500 to homeowners and landlords each time common garbage is found inside the 65-gallon, blue recycling containers provided by the city.

Following a written warning issued by the public works director, the city also may resort to removing the recycling container from properties that can’t seem to get the swing of sorting trash.

The reason for the seemingly punitive measure, City Manager Jim Gailey said, is that residents of the Red Bank Village area have taken to tossing all manner of refuse into their recycling containers, costing the city $45,000 in additional disposal fees since March 2011.

“This is money that we were ratcheting back every year, because we were doing better at reducing our solid waste in this community,” he said at a council workshop Monday. “Now we have $45,000 tacked on to our general fund budget that was supposed to be a savings to us.”

South Portland contracts with Pine Tree Waste to handle curbside pickup of trash and recyclables throughout the city each Tuesday through Friday, and to transport that refuse to the ecomaine facility in Portland. The city pays nothing for recyclable materials, but does get charged $88 per ton for any trash run through ecomaine’s incinerator. Although ecomaine runs a so-called “single sort” recycling center – meaning items like newspaper, cardboard, plastic and glass can by lumped together – it will not accept loads that come with trash mixed in.

“If anything higher than 15 percent of a load is judged to be contaminated, the whole load is rejected,” said acting Public Works Director Tim Gato.

“This is a very personal issue to me, because I am on the Friday pick up,” said Gato. “My recycling container is full of clean recycling every week. But the idea of having my bucket rejected as part of a bigger rejected load really bugs me.”

According to Gailey, “every Friday” for nearly a year, ecomaine has refused entire recycling loads brought in by Pine Tree Waste and redirected them to the incinerator. Photographs taken by ecomaine to document the problem show non-recyclable items, such as dirty diapers, lawn clippings, food scraps, home electronics and “bulky waste,” like baby strollers and vacuum cleaners, mixed into recycling containers.

“Those loads getting rejected every single Friday are absolutely killing us,” said Gailey. “And there is definitely a swing here.”

According to numbers provided by ecomaine, last March, South Portland had recycled 46 tons more than in the previous 12 months, while the amount of raw trash going into the incinerator was down 455 tons. That was good for a $40,000 savings, a number factored into this year’s budget. But then at the end of March, Gato said, the waste facility had to shut down its conveyors for cleaning after a South Portland drop. That’s when they started rejecting recycling loads.

“After once, twice, it was a constant monitoring,” said Gailey. “It was a very clear line that we crossed.”

By December, South Portland’s waste disposal was up 61 tons (for a $5,368 bill), while recycling was down 133 tons, year to date.

“And it was always Friday that got rejected,” said Gailey. “There are individuals on the Friday route who are not playing ball on the recycling side of things and, in a sense, they have double the capacity of solid waste that everyone else does in this community. It’s not right.”

Pine Tree Waste’s Friday route hits several neighborhoods, including Red Bank Village, Country Gardens, Meadow Glen, Sunset Park and Thornton Heights, among other areas. However, Gailey said, a six-week “flipping-lids audit” conducted by city crews last summer narrowed the problem down to Red Bank apartment complexes.

“We tagged enough cans to know that it’s more than just one or two people contaminating their recycling,” said Gailey. “We have a few people who are contaminating the good that everyone else is trying to achieve.”

“I am particularly pained by this whole issue,” said Mayor Patti Smith, who featured green initiatives and sustainable lifestyles in her inaugural address, less than two months ago.

“Everyone knows how much this means to me,” she said. “When I saw the ecomaine photos, it was just a crusher. I think there is a grander mission that I had hoped we would all live by, to think about recycling and taking care of the earth, because how much can we put into our landfills? My hope is that people will do the right thing, but based on what we’ve done thus far, I think we do need to institute some penalties.”

“The fine has to be substantial enough for it to be painful,” said Councilor Rosemarie De Angelis, in response to concern expressed by her fellow councilor, Gerard Jalbert, that the $250 minimum per violation could be excessive, for some.

But Gailey said, he “exhausted all efforts” to seek compliance in the past year, before eventually resorting to a fine.

“We waited almost a year to bring this to council,” he said. “We wrote letters, we met personally with people, we did six weeks of inspections, Pine Tree did additional inspections. We notified those who were in violation, we gave them additional educational material, we had the [neighborhood resource] hub person go around doing ‘knock and talks.’ We did everything.”

The council seemed generally supportive of instituting fines, especially after Gato promised that between spot checks by public works and video monitors attached to the Pine Tree Waste trucks, the ordinance can be administered at no cost to the city.

However, there was considerably less enthusiasm for the possibility of taking away recycling cans in some locations.

“Taking the bins away admits defeat,” said Smith. “It says they won the day if they no longer have the bins. I’m saddened that it has to get to this point, but I honestly feel that we need to educate and keep fining people until change happens.”

Meanwhile, Jalbert suggested that some people would simply cross the street to dump trash in somebody else’s recycling container, once their garbage bin is full. That, he said, would create a nightmare scenario for the city.

“You’re not going to be 100 percent correct in who you fine,” he told Gato. “Even if you are wrong only 1 percent of the time, someone’s going to end up [asking], ‘Why am I being fined?’”

Based on the suggested approach, Councilor Tom Blake intimated that fighting over recycling fines could become a way of life at South Portland City Hall, given an increasingly transient population.

As owner of three apartment buildings in the city, and manager of a fourth, Blake said he “deals with it all the time.”

That’s because 45 percent of South Portland’s housing stock is apartment units. And that’s before adding in “a phenomenon that’s really taking off” – single-family homes rented out. The problem, said Blake, is that the average renter stays in a unit “less than two years,” creating constant turnover and a need to indoctrinate new residents.

“Every six to eight months I have to go up to public works and pick up a new stack of flyers,” said Blake, referring to the posters prepared by the city that detail suitable contents for the recycling bins.

“We have 50 percent of our people who are moving every two years,” said Blake. “That’s huge. So, to me, the answer isn’t slapping fines. It’s education.”