Recycling with Joe DeRisi and Alice Kosowsky

Matt talks to Recycling Coordinator Joe DeRisi and Chair of the Solid Waste & Recycling Commission Alice Kosowsky. They talk about everything from composting and other ways of recycling food waste to the importance of recycling textiles and lots more. If you’re a Hamden resident, you’re sure to pick up some useful tips, and even if you don’t live in Hamden, you will likely learn something interesting from this interview. Now let’s listen to Matt, Joe and Alice. 

Transcript

Michael Pierry: Welcome to the Hamden Library Podcast. I am your host, Michael Pierry, and in this episode, Matt talks to Hamden's recycling coordinator, Joe DeRisi, and Alice Kosowsky, chair of the Solid Waste and Recycling Commission. They talk about everything from composting and other ways of recycling food waste to the importance of recycling textiles and lots more.

If you're a Hamden resident, you're sure to pick up some useful tips, and even if you don't live in Hamden, you will likely learn something interesting from this interview. Now let's listen to Matt, Joe, and Alice.

Matt McGregor: For this recycling episode of the Hamden Podcast, I have two guests, Alice Kosowsky from the Solid Waste Commission, and Joe Derisi, the town's recycling coordinator. So who are you? What do you do for the town? And how do you work together, if you do? Joe, we'll start with you. 

Joe DeRisi: I am the town recycling coordinator, as so stated, and I work for Public Works, although my desk is in the mayor's office, which is where I actually work. I am a part-time person, and I do mostly educational things about recycling and other administrative tasks like invoicing and things like that.

We have recently finished Earth Day, as an example of an activity I do, and that involved not only that day, but other events. Yeah, that's very briefly what I do. 

Matt McGregor: Tell me a little bit more about Earth Day. How did those events go? What did you do? Is there anything you want to brag about from your Earth Day stuff?

Joe DeRisi: Ah. So the Earth Day, the last two years has been at the Miller Memorial Library, mostly inside and some activities outside. And we typically get nowadays about 40 exhibitors from various environmental groups and municipal groups and environmentally related contractors. We have music, we have food trucks, which I'm sure we'll talk about shortly.

We had a clothing swap, and we had free snacks from Haven's Harvest and things like that to get people together in community and thinking about things and, get free plants and all that kind of stuff. We also had a number of events, tours at some local businesses that are doing environmental and social justice work, J. Joiners and Freedom Reads. 

And then we had a tour of our own composting operation at the transfer station, as well as at the composting operation at Common Ground School in New Haven, which is right down the street. And then we had, the Green Team tour at Bear Path School, where the students participate in single stream and food, not only recycling, but food diversion, and that food goes to our food bank to feed people.

So the idea was to get some of our municipal leaders and other folks out into the field to see things actually happening, because I think one of the things we need to do about recycling is to look at the connections, that recycling isn't this isolated thing that we do that doesn't connect to anything else.

And the other thing that I always have to work on is the solid waste that we produce costs the town a lot of money to discard. So the more we can recycle, in theory, the less money we spend on throwing things away and the greener it is in that we are causing less pollution. 

Alice Kosowsky: If I can add to what Joe just said, because Hamden does not yet have a sustainability director, Joe functionally is our sustainability director.

People call him with all kinds of things that don't necessarily have to do with recycling, even though he is the recycling coordinator. He dreams up a lot of programs, ideas, impromptu coalitions between departments of the town, actors within the town, and Joe has quite a creative side to him. I also wanted to modify some of the things or add to some of the things that Joe just said about Earth Day.

Traditionally, Hamden's had an Earth Day since very, very long time ago, with lots of involvement from teachers and children. Over the past five years, Earth Day has expanded to not be just a day. It's given the, state of our sustainability and environment, it's very, very important for Earth Day not just to be a day.

So in the last two, three years, Joe and the community members who support him for Earth Day have expanded Earth Day from a day to a week and becoming a month. And there are series of environmentally oriented educational experiences now, some of which are not under Joe's purview. For instance, the wonderful programs being put on by the Hamden Alliance for Trees.

Those people are astounding in that they've brought in so many educational and informational and inclusive activities. But Joe has certainly started reaching out to various groups, not just exhibitors who come in and talk about their program, but programs that reach out to people where they are and elicit a lot more participation from people in town.

I also wanted to talk about some of the tours that Joe organized at the transfer station and at Common Ground have been not just for municipal leaders, although that is very essential for our town's progress as a sustainable community. The tours have really brought together, for instance, in this last tour of Common Ground, the Common Ground food waste composting operation at Common Ground High School, was a chance for people in Hamden to learn much more--as they had in another previous year as well--about the inclusion of food waste as part of composting, and thus as part of solid waste management. 

Matt McGregor: I suppose backing up a little bit, Alice, can you tell me a little bit more about who you are and what you do for the town?

Alice Kosowsky: My name is Alice Kosowsky. I am the chairperson of the Solid Waste and Recycling Commission. Commissions in general are set up by state charter and local charter. So thus our actions, our purview, our powers are regulated. We have a relationship, however, with the town as a commission to think about, form ideas about, and bring forth those ideas about solid waste management and recycling.

So our area of special concern is materials management, which these days, environmentalism has been our focus, and of course is what we are inherently most concerned with: preventing, retarding climate change. However, in the Hamden of our current life, cost management has become extremely important. In a way, luckily, costs reflect environmental regression.

So if we deal intelligently, and of course, what one does in any political context is the art of the possible, what we are trying to do is address costs as a way of realistically managing finances for the town, and having the most powerful implications for our environmental and public health. And in a way, because the current political situation--and I'm not talking locally here, I am talking federal--because the political situation is so adverse to environmental thinking and the poison-ness of fossil fuel energy and power, we have, in a sense, a chance to rework our political system and its responsiveness.

And one of the biggest reasons that I'm doing this commission work is to try to influence our local government with the feelings, the convictions, and the concerns of local people. Local people are extremely involved and interested and worried, and children are worried about our survival as human beings, animal survival, even insect survival, plant survival, health. The continuation of life.

So our commission is composed of right now four people, which we're looking for new commissioners if anyone is so interested. We are just community people. None of us are experts in this field, in any of these fields, but we are people who care enough to learn, to surmount our natural shyness in talking to and presenting to political leaders and decision-makers, to learn about ways of interacting with the public.

It's a profoundly educational role, and we've come to enjoy it, although sometimes it scares us. And Joe has been very helpful in giving us a lot of information, sometimes opposing us, but most of the time educating us and presenting his experiences, because he's been involved with the dynamics of municipal waste management for a while.

So I will talk soon about our plans. Perhaps you have some questions for Joe. 

Matt McGregor: I do. Joe, for those of us playing at home here, what is recycling? How does recycling work? And especially, what types of recycling does Hamden do? 

Joe DeRisi: That's a lot of question. 

Matt McGregor: Big picture. 

Joe DeRisi: So recycling is essentially taking what we would normally call waste and reusing it in some other capacity. The material that we recycle could be looked at as a value-added product as opposed to trash. 

Matt McGregor: Mm-hmm. 

Joe DeRisi: We don't recycle everything that we use, but we do recycle a portion of it, and that includes food scraps [and] single-stream recycling. And single-stream recycling means cans and bottles and cardboard; everything that goes in Hamden into your blue bin.

And that gets sorted at a facility and then reused in some capacity, ground up and made into something else, essentially. 

Matt McGregor: Mm-hmm. 

Joe DeRisi: Generally speaking. So the same with food. We can-- I'll use Bear Path as an example. There's Bear Path program, the students have a share table, so if you don't want an apple, you can leave it on the table and someone else can eat it.

That's one way to, to recycle, if you will- 

Matt McGregor: Mm-hmm... 

Joe DeRisi: instead of throwing it away. Then there's diversion, which is the food that no one wants is brought by--in this case--a nonprofit called Haven's Harvest, and distributed. In one place that it goes is to the food bank, where it's given away to people who need it.

And then the third way to recover food, recycle, is to collect it, to compost it, and basically it turns into soil, which can be used to grow new food, in theory. Some of it actually is turned into electricity, which is certainly another way to recycle food waste. So that's single stream, and that's food waste.

Now, we also have all of it's called municipal solid waste, and the reason why it's called municipal solid waste is because the town produces it from residents, and the town is responsible for recycling it, as opposed to commercial recycling, which is different. That would be businesses in the town that are responsible for their own recycling.

It doesn't come out of our public works budget. But to accommodate residents, it does, and schools. So we have all of this municipal solid waste, which costs a lot of money to throw away, and it has environmental impacts. So the idea is to develop programs to decrease what we throw away and increase what we recycle.

There's another element which is called source reduction, which is if we use less stuff to begin with, then we won't have as much waste to try to recycle. So we don't only wanna think about recycling, we wanna think about reducing what we use so that we don't have to recycle as much. Now, the interesting thing is, 'cause budgets are always tight, we don't wanna incur more costs in order to recycle, even though there's this very important element, which is if it looks less expensive to throw out your whatever it is, the problem is that there are other costs involved to the environment, and they're called externalities, which is it's not on your budget sheet as a cost, but it's producing methane in Pennsylvania, so it's a cost to the environment.

Matt McGregor: You're burning, I don't know, you're burning trash, and that's marginally increasing the rates of some sort of disease, but that doesn't show up when you look at- 

Joe DeRisi: Right ... 

Matt McGregor: the cost of getting rid of the trash. 

Joe DeRisi: No. So, beside the food waste and the single stream recycling, then we have household trash, which can be a lot of different things, right?

Paper towels and all that. And then we have what's called bulk trash or oversized municipal waste, which is things like furniture and mattresses, and then we have hazardous things like paint and household chemicals, and we have to have programs to address all of those. So we have a state program that addresses recycling mattresses and paint, and the trick is to get the mattresses and the paint to the transfer station in town so that they can be recycled.

So that's two things. Then we have other hazards, which goes to a program called Haz Waste, which the town pays for, along with all the communities in the region, and they take care of things like household chemicals, gasoline, oil, that kind of thing... paint that doesn't get recycled. Well, it doesn't get recycled through the transfer station.

It all does get recycled. Incidentally, most of the paint that you bring to the transfer station goes to a factory, and they remix it and reformulate it, and it stays as paint. Okay, so we were talking about the transfer station and recycling programs. We wanna add that we also recycle electronic devices, batteries, light bulbs, and appliances.

And those need to be recycled because there's potentially hazards in them and taking them apart and reusing the materials is obviously environmentally sound. And the electronics don't really cost the town any money other than we have to manage it. And actually, metal recycling is something else we do at the transfer station, which actually earns the town some money.

So, we have all of those programs, and it relies on residents, in the case of the transfer station, bringing those recyclables to the transfer station. And I know there's been some complaints from residents because we now have a scale and a fee program. We did that not to increase tax revenue by charging at a gate, but we actually have reduced costs significantly by having that gate there.

Because what used to happen is that a lot of people would bring things to the transfer station that they were not supposed to bring, and we had to then pay for it because it goes into a container, and then our waste hauler, our vendor, takes those containers and hauls them off. So, if somebody came in with an entire truck filled with some house clean-out, which could cost, you know, $700 or $900 plus hundreds to transport it, the town is paying for that out of taxes.

Well, we've eliminated that by having a gate. So, what it does is it redistributes the cost to the people who actually throw the stuff away or recycle it or bring it in recycling, not to the general budget of the town, and it helps pay for the operation of the transfer station. So even though you may have to spend a little money out of pocket at the gate throwing away your old furniture, it's actually saving the town money.

Matt McGregor: Did I see something on the website that you get charged for recycling and trash at different rates?

Joe DeRisi: That is correct. So, we have two categories. One is organics, and organics includes food waste, which residents are allowed to bring to the transfer station and drop off, and also brush and leaves, which the town collects twice a year, and residents and some commercial haulers bring to the transfer station, and it gets composted.

The mulch that results from composting the leaves and the brush is available for residents for free at the transfer station. And the difference in cost is we have an exemption for organics so that the first 200 pounds, whether it's food or brush or leaves that a resident brings per day, is exempt from any fees.

And then after 200 pounds per trip, it's six cents a pound. So, you would... If you brought 300 pounds of leaves, it would cost you six cents times 100 pounds, which is $6. Other trash, bulk trash, the first 40 pounds are exempt, and from 41 to 200 pounds, it's six cents, and over 200 pounds is 10 cents. So, what that does is it covers the cost for when you're getting large loads of trash that we have to haul off.

So those are all existing programs. And my job is not so much monitor those programs, other than there's reports that have to be filed periodically for the state, but public works staff monitors the operation of all those effectively. What I have to do is look at those systems and try to find ways to make them better and, on a good day, cost less and recycle more.

The objective is to reduce what we throw out and reduce the cost for what we have to manage. 

Matt McGregor: Alice, I actually wanted to bring this back to you because I know that there's one thing that I didn't hear on there, which was those big white textile bins. We have one in the parking lot of the library.

What's going on with those? 

Alice Kosowsky: Thank you very much for bringing that up. Textiles are a very important and expanding segment of what we throw away in this country. We have become buyers and discarders of much more textile material than we ever were before. It really adds a lot to what we're throwing away, and the implications of throwing textiles away are bad.

When textiles go to landfill, they leach out their dyes, which are extremely poisonous. They leach out if the material that's in the textiles is even partially synthetic Polyester, acrylic, nylon, et cetera. They off gas emissions that we don't want in our world, and they also, of course, take up poundage of stuff to be loaded to the landfill and that we pay for.

One of the things that people in general are not as aware of as would be optimal is that transportation costs for carting stuff away are paid for in our contract with our hauler. So, we have set up a program with the town for four clothing swaps a year. These clothing swaps work along with the contract that the town of Hamden has established with Bay State Recycling.

They take whatever clothes people donate to them, pay the town $120 per ton for that material, and give the clothing that's reusable, they give to people in countries that don't have an integral clothing industry. You don't wanna sabotage a country's industry. They use the remaining cloth as insulation and as wiping cloths that you no longer have to buy at Home Depot.

So, it's a very profitable arrangement, and it's very profitable for all concerned. So, what we have done in our commission is we've come up with the idea of a clothing swap. At a clothing swap, people can feel free to bring materials, cloth, bedspreads, curtains, towels, as well as clothing, shoes to these swaps.

You can bring so that people in the community get them directly and for free. You can also come and just take. And anything that's left over is donated for the benefit of the town, that $120 per ton. 

Matt McGregor: So, we're in May today. When's the next clothing swap coming up? 

Alice Kosowsky: The next scheduled clothing swap is at Brooksville Park for the fest in September.

However, I'm hoping to get another one before that time, 'cause my goal is four. I also want to inspire people for their own groups. Putting on a clothing swap is a very easy affair. It needs some publicity beforehand and a place. And by doing so, you can attract a lot of people to your event because people can get something that they really need for nothing.

And it could be a very helpful side attraction for a larger event, such as Hamden Fest or a fair, or your church group's get-together, or your lodge. I encourage people to think about that as an option, and we'd be glad to help. 

Matt McGregor: And if someone was going to reach out to the Solid Waste Commission for help, how would they get in touch with you?

Alice Kosowsky: They could always get in touch with me through Joe, and Joe Derisi's email is jderisi@hamden.com. And, and/or they could get in touch with me through my own email, which is A-K-O-S-O-W-S-K-Y, the number four, @gmail.com [akosowsky4@gmail.com]. 

Joe DeRisi: And people, residents should call me when they have any question about recycling. 

Matt McGregor: At what number? 

Joe DeRisi: At 203-287-7021.

And my email is J-D-E-R-I-S-I, jderisi@hamden.com. And if you forget those numbers, just call the mayor's office and Chris, who's the administrative assistant, will just send you over to my phone, which is about 20 feet away from his 

Matt McGregor: Or call the library and we'll look up Joe's number- 

Joe DeRisi: Yeah.

Matt McGregor: And we'll send you there too. Before we go, do either of you have anything else coming up that you want to talk about? 

Alice Kosowsky: Our signature issue in the Hamden Solid Waste and Recycling Commission is food waste composting at a local scale, and there's a very exciting thing happening right now. The state has allocated a piece of money.

We don't necessarily need all that money, but we could certainly use a part of it to establish local composting with leaves and food waste. There are a number of decisions that would need to be made in order for this to happen, and we as a commission are very excited about facilitating the town's process of making those decisions.

We would very much like to extend our expertise, our interest, our time toward an evaluation of the costs of various kinds of development, what exact kinds of operations would occur. We would like to look at all food waste as being usable as opposed to only part of what people eat. We would like to look at who would carry out this kind of composting.

We would like to look at whether this composting should be occurring at one place in town or two or maybe even three. We would like to be looking at whether the soil that is thus produced would be used as soil or partially for fertilizer. We would also like to look at possibility of grants as part of the funding for these operations.

This is our signature issue even more so than the textiles, although we love that too, and we would very much like for the town to be thinking about this as a real possibility. 

Joe DeRisi: So yeah, I'll make a follow-up to the food composting. I'll go to the big picture instead of the various nuances of how we're going to get there. I just read this the other day, and it's a quote from Biocycle, and it said, "Compost offers American farmers a path out of the global fertilizer crisis."

So we can contribute on the local level to solving that problem. The town could theoretically divert about 2,800 tons of food waste per year from the waste stream. And it's pretty well established that typically if you compost food waste rather than throw it away, once you get that program established, you'll save between $30 and $100 per ton.

And in our case, our town's case, that would be between $85,000 and $300,000 per year. That's savings. That means that's covered operational costs. But we have to start smaller than that perhaps, and we are working on those programs. 

Alice Kosowsky: How many pounds is municipal solid waste? 

Joe DeRisi: Hamden produces about 14,000 tons per year of municipal solid waste.

Alice Kosowsky: And how- 

Joe DeRisi: 2,800 of that would be food based on generally accepted percentages. 

Matt McGregor: So that's like 20%? 

Joe DeRisi: Yes, 20% of what we put in the trash is food. So if you can home compost, bring it to your community garden that you're a member of, bring it to the transfer station, and you could use, by the way, free pails, which we give out for that purpose.

Just have to call me at 287-7021, 203 area code, and, you can get your free pail. Those all contribute only a small amount, but when you add it all up...

Let me throw one more thing in there in terms of moving us towards collecting more food waste. We have a program at Bear Path School where we save probably, per school year, close to four tons between diversion and, composting.

And that program could theoretically be duplicated at our other schools. And another step could be that since we already have containers there where the students are putting the food waste into it, if a person, say, dropping that student off in the morning brought their food waste and put it into the same container, we would capture more food without increasing costs of the program by very much.

So that's another idea about how we can capture, make an incremental step towards saving our food. And of course, all of that is contingent on a very important step, which is that we start taking the food waste that we capture from residents in the schools, bringing it to the transfer station, and composting the food waste with our leaves that we already compost.

That will save us considerable money, and it will allow us to have a compost at the end that will really be able to augment agricultural uses locally. And the prime goal here is to keep things local and regional, and that's how we assist with the global problem of fertilizer shortages, besides the waste problem that we have.

Matt McGregor: I do have a couple specific recycling items. I'm not sure how they should get handled. So books. Books are made out of paper, books are made out of cardboard. Both of those things are recyclable. Can I take my old book and put it in the recycling?

Joe DeRisi: Yes and yes. You can put hardcover or softcover books into the blue container.

But what you don't wanna do is put books that have, spiral metal bindings or that have sheet plastic covers. It's okay if it's got some kinda laminate or whatever, or it's a regular hardcover book, and magazines of course. But you just don't wanna mix metal in there and things like that.

But yeah, books can go into the blue bin. 

Matt McGregor: You can also bring your books to the Hamden Library, where they will go to the library book sale, which helps to keep our programs free. This next one may have been covered, but a coworker had an old USB cable. Is this regular waste, electronics waste?

There's metal in there, but it's got a plastic coating on this. Recyclable, not recyclable? 

Joe DeRisi: Recyclable, but you must bring it to the transfer station and put it into the bin with electronic devices 

Matt McGregor: All right, and my last one, the one that I always wonder about, pizza boxes. They're cardboard, but they have a lot of food waste on them, so what should I do with my pizza boxes in Hamden?

Joe DeRisi: Okay, so pizza boxes can be recycled in the blue container, and here's the standard that I derived. This is not necessarily some official... this is not peer reviewed. So, if the pizza box, often the food contaminants are on the bottom section, and if the top section is clean, you can just rip that off and recycle it.

If the bottom section has a very minimum amount of food on it or oil, then it's okay if there's a little bit on there to recycle it. If it's really gross, I put it into the green bin. That's my standard there. They do have a way when they process all of this stuff at the center to separate it so that the food waste is removed, but th- they prefer that they don't get any.

Alice Kosowsky: Black plastic? 

Joe DeRisi: Black plastic is an interesting case. So the takeout containers you get that have a black plastic bottom or the black plastic you get at the nursery with your seedlings in it, in some locations you cannot recycle that in your normal single-stream, in this town, blue bin recycling.

But in Hamden you can, because our vendor brings it to a recycling facility which can process black plastic. So it is okay to put it into the recycling. 

Matt McGregor: Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for being on the podcast. I'd love to have you again if either of you want to come back on. Have a lovely day.

Joe DeRisi: Okay. Thank you. 

Alice Kosowsky: Thank you very much. 

Matt McGregor: I think that's it. 

Joe DeRisi: Good. 

Matt McGregor: I think that's it. Good. 

Michael Pierry: That's all the time we have on this episode. Thanks for listening. See you next time.