Dear Recycling Supporter,
SCRAM has continued to provide our members with solid waste management information, services and representation that has been timely and professional. Your membership is crucial to our financial support and proof to funders of constituent support. You can help further by showing this letter to potential new members or by sending the names of businesses and individuals in your town you feel would be interested to john@scramweb.org.
This is an update of what we have been doing for our members in the last eight months through our DEP regional grant.
This grant was a huge success bringing the following firsts to the region.
The following is a final report by section comparing the accomplishments of the grant to the grant proposal. This is a summation of the more detailed reports that accompanied the three invoices and time sheets throughout the grant period.
Section One waste reduction and disposal contract assistance. We provided Technical assistance to the following towns on Pay As You Throw Bolton, East Brookfield, Harvard, New Braintree, Sherborn and Worcester. We are continuing to provide close assistance to East Brookfield who will start their program in September of this year. The work with East Brookfield has given us a chance to put Pay As You Throw in the Worcester Telegram and small local papers at least once a month for the past four months. Harvard voted down going with a program at this time but may go with a program in the future. Sherborn looks very promising and should have someone working directly with them as I have East Brookfield to keep them on track. I have mentioned this to Joe Lambert.
We provided technical assistance to a number of towns on writing haulers permits or licenses. We are pleased to say that Oakham and New Braintree have made great progress towards implementing their new permits.
We provided a number of meetings to begin discussions on writing solid waste management contracts regionally. We worked with two separate groups on this. One group was around Barre (New Braintree, Hardwick, Oakham, North Brookfield, Brookfield, Petersham) the other group was around Winchendon( Royalston, Ashby, Phillipston, Petersham).
The only area of this section that we are unhappy with is our per capita waste study. We are still waiting on information from John Crisely that clarifies the number of households being used in each community to base our numbers on rather than just the total population. We intend to get this resolved and on our website and newsletter ASAP.
We estimated 150 hours for this section of the grant and only spent 93.5 which was mainly do to the demand on our time in other areas.
Section Two of our grant focused on hazardous waste management and is where the majority of our effort was focused do to two projects that demanded the extra time.
The designing of the North Brookfield Regional Permanent HHP Collection facility, its site assignment permit preparation and the inter-municipal agreements between participating towns was overwhelming. This huge project alone could have used the whole budget of this grant. We spent many hours with numerous experienced HHP collection experts and state officials fine tuning the details of our site design. We have had site visits with numerous contractors to get our three bids on all work to be done. We have had numerous meetings with participating towns individually and as a group to hammer out the inter-municipal agreements. We found out through one of the DEP training sessions that these agreements must go before town meetings in each town to be legally binding which has put off our start up date for the full regional effort until this fall.
The City of Worcester school system has never done a complete inventory or clean-out of hazardous materials. We coordinated a comprehensive training by Hillary Eustace and Stephen George of the Office of Technical Assistance that covered safe storage, handling, disposal and purchasing of hazardous materials for schools. This training was attended by staff from 12 schools in the system. We then provided one on one technical assistance to three schools to look at their storage problems and start changing their management systems. We look forward to continuing our relationship with the Worcester schools and expect to bring another training session this fall for the teachers unable to make our last training. We have brought Worcester State College's Health and Safety Officer Bob Clark into the Worcester schools to be a local provider of detailed technical assistance only someone with his experience can provide. Bob has offered his services in the past to the Worcester schools but this is the first time he has actually gotten involved thanks to our coordination and mutual involvement with the state wide Multi Agency Task force for Schools MATS.
We provided assistance to Fitchburg's regional Montachuset Technical School to inventory and clean-out its unwanted chemicals. We continue to provide similar assistance to Tantasqua Regional of Sturbridge.
We have provided assistance to two potential regional HHP collection programs one between Lancaster and Clinton the other between the towns of Winchendon, Royalston, Ashby, Phillipston. The latter of these two looks like a good permanent regional site prospect that needs immediate attention.
Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs) recycling has taken up more time than we initially thought. We have provided direct assistance to the following towns Brookfield, East Brookfield, West Brookfield, North Brookfield, Hardwick, Paxton, Leicester, Sturbridge, Royalston, Oakham, Gardner and Hubbardston. Our new web site scramweb.org provides easy access to market information and the DEP web site for information on CRT recycling.
We provided techncial assistance to Hubbarston to negotiate Oil collection services with SafetyKleen Corp. and set up future collections of filters and antifreeze.
We have also kept up with the new mercury emission standards meetings in the region and provided collection and health and safety information to municipalities attending these meetings.
As you can see we have accomplished a lot in this section and it took most of our budget. We estimated 150 hours for this section and it took 274. The biggest problem we encountered in this section was the lack of a willingness for Worcester schools administration to take responsibility for its hazardous waste.
Section Three of our grant focused on Recycling Technical assistance. Most of our time in this section was spent on regional meetings to develop better communication between haulers and municipalities. We had a number of meetings with Waste Management in Barre to open up their recycling drop off to area residents and subscription haulers. This has been discouraging due to the departure of the manager of this facility right after we had put together a implementation plan. We still are looking forward to this work becoming a reality.
We have coordinated a number of meetings in the region as MassRecycle's Municipal Recycling Counsel Co-chair to discuss barriers to recycling participation, record keeping and a state recycling publicity campaign.
We have spread the news about a new freon recovery and recycling option in the region. We have helped towns find markets for recyclables on an on call basis, seven days a week at all hours day or night to numerous towns.
We gave a presentation on reuse sheds and paint recycling for our MRIP coordinator year four presentation.
We have worked with a local hauler Fred Fijal that has had a pour record of recycling to try and understand his barriers and provide solutions.
We have provided technical assistance to towns preparing their waste ban compliance plans.
We set up two new school recycling programs in elementary schools in Charlton and Monson. Both schools are handling all paper and corrugated.
We estimated this section to take the majority of our time 215 hours but it only received 146.5 hours due to the greater need in the second section. Our only problem in this section is that most towns are comfortable with their recycling programs as is and are in more immediate need of assistance with areas like CRTs and HHP because they are new to them.
In conclusion we are extremely happy with the success of this grant and look forward to continuing our relationship with DEP to work on the next step with some of these projects and new ones.
Sincerely,