SANDWICH — Numbers for the second year of the town's pay-as-you-throw trash program show Sandwich has cut its solid waste in half.
In 2009, the town sent 6,000 tons of trash from its transfer station to SEMASS Resource Recovery Facility, a Rochester plant that turns rubbish into electricity, according to Waste Zero, the consulting company hired by the town to help launch the program. That number dropped to under 3,000 tons in 2013.
Pay as you throw
These towns on the Cape and Islands have adopted pay-as-you throw trash disposal policies:
Aquinnah
Brewster
Chilmark
Edgartown
Gosnold
Oak Bluffs
Sandwich
Tisbury
Wellfleet
West Tisbury
Source: Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs
At the same time, recycling of plastics, metals and glass has increased by 74 percent, and there's an overall decrease in traffic at the transfer station of 28 percent.
The number of transfer station stickers dropped by about 500 in the first year, Department of Public Works Director Paul Tilton said. But some of those customers came back in the second year.
"We suspect those who left hired private haulers," Tilton said.
The drop in trash and increase in recycling has meant an overall savings to the town of $280,000 — money that's been put back into the transfer station to pay for capital costs and used to offset increased tipping fees, Tilton said.
"It's paid off better than we ever expected," James Pierce, chairman of the town's Board of Selectmen, said.
At the recent town meeting, voters supported a budget for the transfer station that had dropped $500,000 in two years, Pierce said.
Before pay-as-you-throw, the town budget subsidized the transfer station with $750,000 per year.
That's now $250,000 per year and eventually will be fully covered by an increase in sticker prices and bag fees, Pierce said.
"We went in with a five-year plan to slowly decrease the reliance on the (town budget)," Tilton said.
"We knew we were going to reduce the amount of solid waste, but we didn't expect it to go down this much."
The town was looking to cut its solid-waste costs in anticipation of a large increase in tipping fees from SEMASS. Last year, the town signed a new 10-year contract with Covanta Energy, owners of the plant, that nearly doubles the per-ton fee starting in January.
Sandwich is only one of three towns on the Cape that has gone with the pay-as-you-throw program, but is one of 141 cities and towns in the state to adopt it as of January, according to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs.
All of the towns on Martha's Vineyard and tiny Gosnold are also using it.
In nearby Mashpee, where a similar program was put to voters in a townwide referendum in 2011, it failed.
The same thing would have happened in Sandwich unless selectmen took the action they did, Pierce said.
The Board of Selectmen used its authority to set fees to make what was an unpopular change at the time, he said. "My emails were four or five to one against it," Pierce said. Aside from a few complaints about the quality of the bags when the program first started two years ago, opposition has faded, he said.
"We had a few wrinkles to iron out," Tilton said. "We knew people were going to be unhappy at first, but they've accepted the program."
Even with the success Sandwich has had in reducing tonnage, increasing recycling and saving money, Pierce said he understands why the program hasn't caught on in neighboring towns.
"Given the aversion to change that's endemic on Cape Cod, I can't say I'm surprised," he said.
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