Islip pilot recycling program boosts paper pickup by 26%, officials say

A new program boosted paper recycling by 26% weekly during its first two months in the area of West Islip where it was implemented, according to Islip Town leaders who say the initiative could be a money saver as they eye expansion.

The pilot program began June 2. It instituted weekly town paper recycling pickups — rather than the usual biweekly pickups — for a small portion of West Islip that’s home to about 3,600 residents, according to Martin Bellew, who leads Islip’s Department of Environmental Control.

Average weekly paper recycling collections in the test area increased from 5.36 tons to 6.75 tons, or roughly 26%, within the pilot’s first seven weeks.

Bellew said the more frequent pickups make it easier for residents, who don’t have to choose between keeping their paper recycling stored for weeks or just tossing it in the regular garbage.

An economic 'win-win'

There’s also a potential economic upside: Islip saves money when there are fewer tons of garbage to incinerate, and the town makes money by selling the paper it collects for recycling to private vendors, according to Bellew.

“The easier you make it for people, the better,” he said. “The benefit to the town is, number one, it’s more material that we recycle, which is a revenue source. And it’s a cost avoidance that we’re not burning [the paper] as regular refuse. So it’s a win-win on both sides.”

It’s not yet clear how lucrative the pilot program, or an expanded version of it, could be for Islip Town.

Bellew said Islip decided to launch the pilot in part because the selling rate for recycled paper — including everything from cardboard to junk mail — leapt  from $0 “a couple of years back” to about $25 per ton.

Metal, glass and plastic recyclables are still collected biweekly. Bellew said the town is not looking at increasing those collections because it's not as financially practical; the return rate is lower for those materials.

Islip Councilman Michael McElwee said paper recycling had “dwindled off a little bit,” so the town was potentially losing out on revenue. He called the initiative a potential “money saver.”

“It was basically to encourage people to get more into recycling,” said McElwee, whose district includes the pilot program area. “The more paper that is recycled, the less paper that’s going into the general garbage, which is less weight getting incinerated. It’s a good thing.”

The pilot area is situated between Madison Avenue to the west, Robert Moses Causeway to the east, the Southern State Parkway to the north and Orinoco Drive to the south. It houses two of the six recycling routes covered by town employees, according to Bellew, who said Islip's scores of other routes are covered by private contractors.

No end date to program

Bellew said the pilot’s early success could “definitely” be replicated in other parts of Islip, but the town hasn’t collected enough data to determine if the program would fare as well financially at scale.

The pilot’s costs have been “minimal,” but extra pickups on private routes could increase contract costs, Bellew said. And both the per-ton rate for recycled paper and collection amounts also can fluctuate, he added.

Bellew said the pilot program doesn’t have an end date. He said the town will “run it until we feel like we have enough information to make a call on what we want to do moving forward.”

Islip Supervisor Angie Carpenter echoed Bellew’s sentiment about collecting more data but called the pilot “very, very promising.”

“We will see at the end of the pilot period. We will look at all of the numbers and move forward with it,” she told Newsday. “To me, it seems like it really has a lot of possibilities.”

By Sam Kmack

sam.kmack@newsday.com

Sam Kmack covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and previously worked as a city watchdog reporter in the Phoenix metro area, as well as an investigative journalist at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.