Recycling: Make It A Habit

It took weeks for the East Hampton Town Sanitation Department to find the wall - the massive concrete wall at the back of the recycling plant in East Hampton. It was obscured for a good part of the summer by a mountain of garbage estimated, at its worst, to weigh 400 tons.

The pile is gone now, as are the visitors, welcome as they were, who generated most of it. With autumn here, the Sanitation Department has a chance to recover from its toughest summer ever and the town has a chance to evaluate its success at recycling.

Ten years ago, New York State established a goal to halve its waste stream, through recycling and other methods, by December 1997. East Hampton's own solid waste management plan was more ambitious, its goal was to exceed the state's. So how are we doing?

A report from the Sanitation Department states that the town has recycled slightly over 35 percent of its garbage so far this year. The figure includes the plentiful amount of brush from backyard gardeners and professional landscapers which the town turns into wood chips. If you leave the brush out, the town's rate so far this year drops to only 23 percent.

At one point, in April and May, the overall rate was above 43 percent; town officials say they are hoping for a return to 40 percent by the end of the year. That suggests that businesses whose peak is in summer, as well as seasonal residents and visitors, are not as adept at complying with the town recycling laws as year-round residents. It also suggests that the year-round contingent is a key to the town's achieving a 50 percent (or better) recycling rate.

In that vein, The Star and East Hampton Kiwanis have become partners in a plan to encourage the largest segment of the population, those who take their own trash to the dumps, to make their mark starting this winter. There are roughly 10,000 permits for self-haulers, as they are called at the recycling plant, and these are the folks we depend on to lead the way toward better compliance from everyone.

This weekend, members of Kiwanis and Star staffers will be at the East Hampton and Montauk disposal areas handing out refrigerator magnets that, in a neat 2-by-3-inch format, spell out the 10 categories of recyclables that self-haulers are mandated to separate from nonrecyclables.

Although changes in Town Hall earlier in the year made it difficult to get the magnets out to the public before summer, when they might have done the most good, the idea now is to get the year-round population further on track and to help those who arrive next spring jump aboard. Ten years ago, when East Hampton and New York set their goals, recycling was relatively new and a 50-percent rate seemed easily achievable. Harsh economic realities have interfered. Because the cost of doing what was planned is great there have been changes and staff cutbacks. Those in charge are left having to weigh the idiosyncrasies of an economy that makes it cheaper to truck a ton of garbage to a landfill in Pennsylvania than to recycle it.

We have to remember, however, that it is only cheaper in the short term.