Lynn kids ready to lead charge on automated trash collection education

LYNN – Educators in one of the city?s biggest public schools are confident their students can help the local residents leap a language barrier potentially blocking efforts to get them to give up trash barrels in favor of wheel-mounted collection bins.Trash collection company Waste Management is distributing 64-gallon trash bins and 96-gallon recycling bins to 28,000 households in October. The distribution will be the last step the company takes before starting automated trash collection under a five-year contract with the city.Educating residents to use the bins and stop using their trash barrels is a major education effort that Acting Interim Public Works Commissioner J.T. Gaucher said starts with school students.?We?ve already reached out to the schools,” he said.Public works crews visited schools, including Ingalls Elementary, during the last two weeks to give students an up-close look at the big green trash trucks.?The kids were so excited. At first, they thought they were monster trucks,” said Ingalls first-grade teacher Lisa Hynes.Ingalls? enrollment is 740 students, with more than half of the students classified in school enrollment reports as Hispanic and Asian. Hynes said a public works employee explained automatic collection and bin distribution in Spanish to students during a recent visit.?I?m sure there are children who went right home and talked to their parents,” Hynes said.Waste Management plans to launch an automated collection education campaign, including direct mailings, cable television notices and radio spots aimed at local foreign language speakers.Gaucher said North Shore Community College students are helping to design social media advertising focused on automated trash collection?s introduction.The bins are essential to automatic collection, according to Gaucher and Waste Management representatives. Equipped with lids, they are designed to be picked up curbside, dumped, and set down again by a worker using a mechanical arm mounted to a collection truck.The bins will be distributed free to single-family homeowners and residents in multi-family buildings with up to six units. Larger properties currently contract out their own trash pickup. Gaucher said each bin is stamped with a serial number unique to the address where the bin is distributed “so there is no confusion among neighbors.”Although Waste Management will reduce the number of trash collectors assigned to Lynn once automated collection begins, it will need collectors to pick up trash on dead-end streets and small side streets.Ingalls Principal Irene Cowdell said getting parents involved in students? activities has been a priority for Ingalls for two years.Automated trash collection is intended to hold the line on the city?s garbage disposal costs to about $3 million a year – roughly what Lynn currently pays Waste Management – while boosting the city?s recycling rate from 10 percent of disposed trash.Lynn pays about $2 million a year to send trash to the Refuse Energy System incinerator in Saugus.