LIKE MANY big cities, Boston has a poor record when it comes to curbside recycling. In recent years, just 12 to 17 percent of households in the city have recycled their paper, plastic, metal, and glass waste. That's well below the statewide average of 36 percent, which isn't much to write home about itself.
The less the city recycles, the more trash goes into solid waste, which costs the city more than $80 per ton to dispose of. So, it was encouraging when Mayor Menino announced in his State of the City address recently that Boston is going citywide with a pilot program in which recyclable glass, metal, plastic, and paper are collected in a single container. The program has already been tested at 3,000 households in Jamaica Plain and Roslindate, and has boosted recycling rates in those neighborhoods by 53 percent.
The state Department of Environmental Protection helped the city's pilot with a $25,000 grant. The agency could assist more communities in recycling projects if it once again had access to the unclaimed deposits for bottles and cans that were stripped from the department and taken into the state's general fund in 2003.
Until recently, so-called single stream collection was not possible because the crushed glass would compromise the quality of the paper. But as world demand for recycled materials has grown, the processing of it has become more sophisticated, permitting the mixing of materials.
In May, the city gave wheeled 65- or 95-gallon carts to Roslindale and Jamaica Plain residents. In October, the city expanded the pilot program to the South End, where residents can mix their recyclables in the standard 19-gallon blue plastic bins or in 32-gallon clear plastic bags. Several other communities, including Framingham, Southbridge, and Natick, have also converted to single-stream, either with the wheeled carts or the blue bins.
A 2006 revision by the state of its master plan for solid waste stated that waste paper was, by volume, the biggest US export material. By 2005, the state said, US scrap of all kinds had increased in value to $8.4 billion, more than twice the 1999 amount. "By not recycling," the state said, "Massachusetts businesses and residents are literally throwing money away."
In 2002, the DEP's recycling assistance program received $15 million of the more than $30 million in unclaimed nickel deposits. But the Romney administration took all the deposits for the general fund, and the DEP's program now gets an anemic $750,000. Partly because the state's efforts to boost recycling have been half-hearted, the typical household is generating more unrecycled solid waste every year - just the opposite of what the solid-waste master plan for 2000 envisioned. The first step in getting the state back on track is for the Legislature to redirect unclaimed deposits to recycling.
