Talking trash

Needham, Wellesley are rivals in recycling, too

Needham recycling superintendent Charles Laffey at the recycling center. (Globe Staff Photo / Suzanne Kreiter)

Needham and Wellesley have long been rivals. The competition dates at least to the 1880s, when Wellesley broke away from Needham after a raucous secession vote. In modern times, the rivalry is most forcefully expressed in the annual Thanksgiving football game between their two high schools.

Now, the neighboring suburbs are squaring off over trash.

Needham claims the best recycling rate in the state, and it has a trophy, of sorts, to back up the boast. The state Department of Environmental Protection shows Needham with a rate of 69 percent, the highest figure for a community in calendar year 2006, the most recent data available. Wellesley's rate is listed as 49 percent, placing it behind 17 communities and tied with Medway; the survey covers 308 municipalities that report such data.

But the superintendent of Wellesley's Recycling and Disposal Facility says the state's numbers are unreliable, since communities self-report how much waste they dispose of and how much gets recycled; comparing those numbers is how the rate is calculated. And Wellesley's true recycling rate, he says, is much higher than the state calculates.

Edmund Coletta, a spokesman for the DEP, said "the information is as best as we can collect," and officials doublecheck the figures "as best as we can."

He did acknowledge that there are limits to their accuracy. "Yes," said Coletta, "we do rely on the information as reported."

The DEP asks municipalities to fill out a record sheet each year, indicating how many tons of trash residents turn over for disposal and then what it does with that material - which basically is recycle it or take it to a landfill or incinerator, according to Coletta.

The "Residential Recycling Rate" is calculated by taking the tons of material diverted into recycling and composting, and dividing that number by the total tons generated by residents. For example, if a town received 50,000 tons of waste from its residents each year, recycled or composted 18,500 of those tons, and paid to have the remaining 31,500 tons hauled off somewhere, its recycling rate would be 37 percent.

That's where Needham was - 37 percent - 10 years ago. It had even been as low as 28 percent in 1996. But a big change took place in 1998, said Charles "Chip" Laffey, who long served as superintendent of Needham's Solid Waste and Recycling Division. That's when the town started a "pay-per-throw" program. Now, when residents bring their rubbish to the Recycling Transfer Station, they have to put recyclables in one area and nonrecyclable trash in another area. Trash also has to be secured in specially marked bags that residents purchase at their local grocer, said Laffey.

"There was no charge to recycle," he said. "There was a great incentive for residents to get all their paper, and cardboard, and bottles and cans out of the waste stream."

Initially, Needham residents paid 75 cents for a large pay-per-throw trash bag; now, they pay $1.50 for a 30-gallon bag and 75 cents for a 15-gallon bag.

The system helped Needham residents out in another way, too, said Laffey. It made it quick and easy to drop off recycling material.

"You can be in and out in three to four minutes," said Laffey, who was promoted this year to director of Needham's Public Facilities Department. When residents make their weekly trash run, he explained, they can park their car once and drop off each type of recyclable goods and the trash within 50 feet of the car. There's one recycling bin for paper (newspaper, office paper, or magazines), one for cardboard, and one for bottles and cans, and a separate area for trash.

In Wellesley, a resident drives to one spot to unload most recycling material, and drives to another to dump trash. At the recycling spot, residents must separate office paper into one bin, newspapers into another, magazines into a third, and brown paper bags into a fourth. There are two different bins for cardboard: one for corrugated, another for boxboard. Glass containers must be separated by color: green, brown, or clear. Cans must be separated by tin and steel or aluminum, but aluminum trays and foil have their own bin. Plastic must be separated into bottles or other materials, and plastic bags are put in a bin of their own.

Residents dropping off recyclables in Wellesley spend so much time at the facility that it's become a popular site for political candidates to circulate petitions and glad-hand potential supporters.

And Wellesley is proud of its site, too. It has become a showcase for visitors from all over the world who want to examine the town's solution to trash and recycling.

Where Needham has a small isolated doorway where residents can drop off or pick up a few odd pieces of furniture and household goods, Wellesley has a large and elaborate area devoted to such exchanges. A group of volunteer residents, the Friends of Recycling, organize the site, where one a recent day residents could choose from several bags of golf clubs; bicycles; lamps; children's toys, games, and videos; outdoor grills; and computer equipment.

But the state-calculated recycling rate for Wellesley has dropped off in recent years, from a high of 70 percent in calendar year 2003 to a sudden drop to 56 percent in 2004. Gordon Martin, Wellesley's recycling facility superintendent, suggested the figures used by the state to make its calculations are not entirely reliable. For example, each municipality is asked to indicate how many tons of yard waste it takes in each year.

"It's a mistake to include yard wastes in the calculation," he said, "because most communities don't have scales to weigh it. They look at a pile and estimate; it's like throwing a dart on the wall."

Regardless of what the state calculates, Martin sees Wellesley's recycling effort as one that is successful and growing.

"Wellesley is making a lot of money in its program," said Martin. The town's report for fiscal year 2008 shows it sold $618,396 in recyclables - up 35 percent from the $458,005 it took in during the previous year. Add to that another $67,961 in the sale of compost and fees for dropping off appliances and commercial waste.

Laffey has plans to begin a program of recycling at Needham schools and municipal buildings; Martin recently initiated a new program to recycle wood and to process and sell recycled products from other towns.

The next state recycling report will be released in late fall or early winter, Coletta said, and the rivalry will probably rage on.