The cost of Milton’s contracts to pick up and dispose of trash, recycling materials, and yard waste this year went up almost $820,000, or about 32 percent.
At a special town meeting on Monday night, the community cobbled together enough money from a variety of sources to cover the higher tab, but many are wondering whether the higher disposal costs are becoming the new normal.
Recycling costs started rising last year when China stopped accepting contaminated materials for processing. That action flooded the recycling market, sending prices for a wide variety of recyclables plummeting. Now companies that pick up recycled materials are charging their customers per-ton fees instead of picking up the materials for free. As a result, pickup costs are soaring.
Stephen Lisauskas, a vice president at WasteZero, a company that advises communities on recycling issues, said Milton is not alone. Many municipalities, he says, have been seeing their recycling costs go up. He says part of the problem is the shift to single-stream recycling, where homeowners throw all of their recycled materials in one container. That approach has made recycling easier for homeowners, but resulted in more contamination, which reduces the value of the recycled materials.
Recycling costs have risen so much across the country that many communities have done away with recycling entirely, telling residents to throw their cardboard, bottles, and newspapers out with the trash. That approach is now allowed in Massachusetts, where waste bans bar the mingling of recyclables and trash.
Milton put its trash and recycling contracts out to bid this summer and the bids that came back stunned town officials. According to the community’s town warrant, the recycling contract jumped 36 percent, rising from $870,000 to nearly $1.2 million. Trash pickup and disposal costs jumped an equal amount, rising from $950,000 to $1.3 million. Yard waste pickup costs increased from $858,128 to just over $1 million.
Meet the Author
Editor, CommonWealth
About Bruce Mohl
Bruce Mohl is the editor of CommonWealth magazine. Bruce came to CommonWealth from the Boston Globe, where he spent nearly 30 years in a wide variety of positions covering business and politics. He covered the Massachusetts State House and served as the Globe’s State House bureau chief in the late 1980s. He also reported for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, winning a Loeb award in 1992 for coverage of conflicts of interest in the state’s pension system. He served as the Globe’s political editor in 1994 and went on to cover consumer issues for the newspaper. At CommonWealth, Bruce helped launch the magazine’s website and has written about a wide range of issues with a special focus on politics, tax policy, energy, and gambling. Bruce is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in Dorchester.
About Bruce Mohl
Bruce Mohl is the editor of CommonWealth magazine. Bruce came to CommonWealth from the Boston Globe, where he spent nearly 30 years in a wide variety of positions covering business and politics. He covered the Massachusetts State House and served as the Globe’s State House bureau chief in the late 1980s. He also reported for the Globe’s Spotlight Team, winning a Loeb award in 1992 for coverage of conflicts of interest in the state’s pension system. He served as the Globe’s political editor in 1994 and went on to cover consumer issues for the newspaper. At CommonWealth, Bruce helped launch the magazine’s website and has written about a wide range of issues with a special focus on politics, tax policy, energy, and gambling. Bruce is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He lives in Dorchester.
It’s unclear why trash disposal costs in Milton went up so much, but it appears the town made a number of changes to the way trash is picked up that resulted in higher charges.
–BRUCE MOHL
