NAHANT — Now that the town’s contract with Waste Management has expired, Nahant residents will have a chance to give their input on the community’s future waste collection efforts.
“We felt that suddenly switching to automated collection without a true public process and without an opportunity for the public to be involved would have been challenging,” said Town Administrator Tony Barletta. “Over the next year, we’re going to be engaging the public in a process about changing how we collect our trash.”
The June 30 expiration of Nahant’s contract with Waste Management came at an especially inopportune time.
Due to a national crisis in the waste and recycling industry, the cost of those services has increased significantly, forcing the town to hunt for new contract options while rates everywhere skyrocket.
“(Nahant’s) challenge is that … our contract will expire while there’s the most uncertainty around future recycling costs,” Barletta said in February.
In addition to a national labor shortage in commercial drivers and diesel technicians, such price increases are also the ripple effect of China’s 2018 National Sword Policy, which imposed strict regulations on the type of waste China will accept from other countries. According to npr.org, until two years ago, about 70 percent of the world’s plastic garbage was bought and processed by China every year.
In the wake of policy changes however, that number has dropped considerably.
“It’s a tough recycling market,” MassDEP spokesman Edmund Coletta also told The Item in February. “China used to take a massive amount of waste from other countries, (but now that it doesn’t), it’s caused quite a backup and created a difficult issue for folks here.”
During last week’s Board of Selectmen meeting, Barletta said the potential of a new contract with higher costs acted as a catalyst for the town to find a solution that would suppress financial impact on residents.
He later added he believes switching to an automated collection service may be the town’s best cost-saving option.
“That option, compared to last year’s rates, could actually (result) in only a three to five-percent increase,” Barletta said. “Or, if we buy the barrels ourselves using state grant money and our own retained earnings and actually see a potential decrease compared to last year’s rates.
“While this year we’re going to see a cost increase, we could offset almost that entire (international) increase by doing automated collection.”
He added that the switch to uniform barrels in the town would have additional benefits other than simply reducing the cost of trash collection.
“Automated collection using uniform barrels not only provides financial savings, but they also have an environmental benefit,” he said. “On an island community surrounded by ocean, having these barrels with lids on them will help prevent pollution by preventing trash from getting into our ocean, they help with rodent issues, and it’s also a faster way of collection, so there will be fewer carbon emissions from trucks.
“The barrels themselves not only present a financial benefit, but there are ancillary benefits to the town.”
Until a final decision is made, however, Nahant has signed a one-year contract with Waste Management, under which residents will still see a roughly 17 percent rise in the cost of trash collection.
Those temporary increases will be paid for by redistributing trash collection fees more equitably on a per-person basis, Barletta said, rather than through a flat rate all residents have been charged since 2013, lowering the average collection fee from $399 to $375.
“Step one is ‘how do you distribute the total cost?’ Step two is ‘how can you reduce the total cost by changing the type of service that you employ?’” He said of where Nahant is at in the decision process. “We want to slow this process down so that we can better adjust to changes and include the public process.”
Elyse Carmosino can be reached at [email protected].
