Cumberland gets in Earth Day spirit
Town gets 40 new recycle bins courtesy of Keep America Beautiful
CUMBERLAND — As Earth Day approaches, municipal employees are trying to show residents that in the long term, recycling is good not only for the environment, but also for their pockets.
“We're trying to get them to look at their trash and see if it really should be trash,” said Donna Kaehler, recycling coordinator for both Cumberland and North Smithfield. “It's not just for the town to say we can fix all the problems, but some of it comes down to the citizens.”
But the town has just made recycling easier and more accessible for residents.
Thanks to a grant from the litter prevention nonprofit Keep America Beautiful and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, there are now 40 new recycling bins at parks and fields around town. While Diamond Hill Park has offered recycling at special events like Autumnfest, this is the first time it will have recycling bins on a permanent basis.
The recycling bins are chained to poles, so they won't tip over. Mayor Bill Murray noted that fields on Saturdays can be in use from 7 a.m. to the nighttime, which creates potential for throwing recyclable items in the trash, or worse, littering.
“The kids are the best to get involved in these things, because they'll bug the parents,” he said.
The Dr Pepper Snapple/Keep America Beautiful Park Recycling Bin Grant program is in its fourth year and has given 3,400 recycling bins across 28 states. This year, Cumberland is receiving 40 of the 914 new recycling bins nationwide.
One reason recycling more will save the town money, Kaehler says, is that the fees for disposing trash into the state landfill are increasing twice over the next two fiscal years. The fee is increasing from $32 per ton to $39.50 on July 1, and it will increase to $47 next year.
The Town of Cumberland is limited to 10,093 tons of solid waste for fiscal year 2017 and 10,070 tons for FY 2018. The cap was 14,900 tons in 2003. This comes from Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, which operates the state's only landfill in Johnston.
Even if the town's population grows, “RI Resource Recovery lowers the cap, because they want you to recycle more,” said George Stansfield, the mayor's chief of staff. “Knock on wood, so far, we've been living with our cap.”
But the town squeaks right underneath it every year, Kaehler said, and it will be hit with higher rates if it goes above. The town can also be hit with fines with there are contaminated loads or solid waste items in a recyclable load, which also hasn't happened for Cumberland.
For example, if a resident tries to recycle a bunch of recyclable items that are in a plastic bag, they won't be recycled.
“If it's all stuck together, who opens that bag? No one opens it,” Kaehler said.
Trash pickup is already over $1 million, the mayor said, out of what will be about a $94 million budget this year.
“The costs don't come down unless people agree to cooperate,” he said.
Adding to the potential for rising costs incurred from solid waste are concerns about the future of the landfill, which is expected to hit capacity by 2038, according to the state Division of Planning.
“The more everybody can do more prolongs a situation that can happen down the road when we're not going to have the landfill available,” Murray said.
If the landfill closes, Kaehler said, the state will have to spend more money to truck waste elsewhere, but costs for maintaining the landfill will remain.
While Kaehler wants people to recycle more, she says it's still better to throw something in the trash that should be recycled than to throw something that should be trashed in the recycling. For example, she said, if 10 percent of a recycling load is materials that can't be recycled, the entire load will be landfilled, meaning plenty of good recycling material is going to waste.
For a picture-filled guide on what can and can't be recycled, visit rirrc.org/customers/municipal-recycling/.
Along with encouraging recycling, the town has also worked to decrease waste going to the landfill by implementing a program for food scraps in the Cumberland Public Schools to be collected for pigs.