Plowing jeers, but recycling cheers

DPW manager wears two hats for the town

Ed Gilbert (left), with Thomas DeMaio, Brookline's public works commissioner, has worked hard to increase recycling. (Dominic Chavez/Globe Staff)

Ed Gilbert may drive a sidewalk snowplow, but for the most part, his Department of Public Works job is to change residents' behavior.

His efforts have garnered the four-year employee both bouquets and brickbats.

Already this winter, Gilbert has fielded dozens of complaints about sidewalk snow - what isn't cleared by residents, what isn't cleared by town sidewalk plows, and, most recently, what the street plows filled in (again and again) after last week's snow-sleet-rain-freeze.

"There's no single solution to this," he said Monday, after his second 16-hour night of plowing sidewalks in four days. "What I tell people is that they wouldn't want to see someone killed in front of their home because they couldn't use the sidewalk."

In his other function, as the town's solid-waste manager, Gilbert's job has been to make recycling a habit. There, the Lexington native has had more success.

This fall, his efforts were lauded by MassRecycle with a Green Binny award, which recognizes that 42 percent of the town's trash consists of recyclables, compared with a state average of about 30 percent in 2006. His policies earned the public coffers $310,000 over 1 1/2 years, just for paper and cardboard. (Other recycled materials save on disposal costs but don't have the same red-hot market.)

"He's a man on fire - he is always on to the next idea" to increase recycling, said John Dempsey, a retired principal and a Solid Waste Advisory Committee member.

But Gilbert said the credit goes to a large group of co-workers and volunteers with the Solid Waste Advisory Committee, school principals, business owners, and others.

"A group of people put this together," he said.

Indeed, Dempsey said that Gilbert has been a successful recruiter of recyclers of all ages: businesses that deposit paper and cardboard in the new Centre Street recycling dumpsters; residents whose efforts have led to lower solid-waste collection in the past two years and a 100-ton increase in recycling last year; and schoolchildren, for whom Gilbert stages a recycling show - a juggler one year, a magician the next.

The market for waste paper is lucrative, Gilbert said, because of demand from China. Many municipalities have been trying to cash in on that by recovering more paper and cardboard from the waste stream.

Still, paper recycling has leveled off in most communities, Gilbert said. "People just aren't buying newspapers," he said

So how does Brookline increase recycling when others aren't?

"We're a very well-read community," joked DPW commissioner Thomas DeMaio. More seriously, he credits Gilbert for being "innovative in encouraging people to recycle. He gets out and talks to people and gets them interested."

Gilbert talks to schoolchildren and writes the "Recycling Corner" of a weekly paper, which sometimes includes the winner of the department's lottery for completing an online survey about trash and recycling. Comments from the survey are helpful, Gilbert said, and he extracts a pledge to recycle more. Winners get a donated $25 Trader Joe's gift certificate.

He also encourages recycling competition between the eight elementary schools, and posts which is meeting the paper quota.

The latest idea to roll out - officially on Dec. 12 - was public recycling barrels at T stops and other high-traffic pedestrian venues. Flanking the "big belly" solar-powered trash compactors (which decrease the number of times DPW staff has to empty those barrels), the town now offers two black recycling barrels, which were funded in part with checks from waste paper sales.

"This is a case of spending money to generate more money," said DeMaio.