I. Report on the opening of the Household Hazardous Waste Collection Center- George Woodbury

II. Mass Recycles Day November 15

Sponsored by Mass Recycles, with the goal of building consumer demand for recycled products and education. (This is a critical counterpart to recycling programs.) Sounds like a chance to bring Lexington recycling efforts into focus as well. Is there interest in an event, or perhaps a publicity effort in conjunction with this day? It might be an opportunity for each of the subcommittees (schools, households, religious groups, business) to make contact with it's target group.

Deadline for registering an event is 10/2. (Brian Taillon 617-388-0244)

III. Solid Waste Management Alternatives- John Andrew's report

IV. Updates from the Subcommittees

V. Report on the North Andover Board of Health meeting

VI. Other business

recycling website

The Massachusetts Inspector General has an ongoing investigation into the "public/private" partnership between the North East Solid Waste Committee (NESWC) and the operators of the Massachusetts Refusetech incinerator in North Andover. In December, 1997, the Inspector General released a report "The North East Solid Waste Committee Project: Planning and Development of a Public Private Partnership." The report is highly critical of the misleading assertions made to sell the incinerator project. It also suggests that Wheelabrator may have provided misleading data on the performance and design of the incinerator. The complete report can be found on the Internet at http://www.magnet.state.ma.us/ig/publ/neswc.pdf. If you would like a copy of the report, contact John Andrews. Some excerpts:

The NESWC project is an extraordinarily expensive public-private partnership planned and developed by the Commonwealth in the 1970s and early 1980s as a partial solution to the state's mounting solid waste disposal problems. Since the NESWC facility began operations more than a decade ago, the disposal fees paid by the NESWC communities have escalated sharply. NESWC communities currently pay approximately $95 per ton for waste disposal - nearly twice the current market price in the region. This rate is expected to exceed $215 per ton by 2004. In promoting the NESWC project, the Commonwealth had assured the NESWC communities that they would actually be receiving a per-ton payment for waste disposal after 1990. . .

In conducting this review, my Office focused on the central role played by the Commonwealth in planning, developing, and marketing the NESWC project to Massachusetts communities. As this report reveals, although the service agreements developed by the Commonwealth protected the interests of NESWC facility's private owner-operator and bondholders, these agreements failed to provide the NESWC communities with sufficient control over the NESWC facility costs or sufficient protection from the project's considerable financial risks.

The service fee formula places most of the financial risk from oil price fluctuations on the NESWC communities. . .

The service agreements require the NESWC communities to compensate MRI for a loss in profits that results from changes in the composition of the solid waste, changes in the law, or any other change in circumstances that MRI did not foresee when the service agreements were signed. . .

The NESWC communities may be required to pay the full cost of capital improvements to the NESWC facility required by new environmental laws even though the facility will be owned by MRI at the end of the contract. . . Thus, communities could be required to amortize in as little as one year the full cost of improvements that have a useful life of decades. This provision has proven to be onerous to the NESWC communities. . .

Cost savings from reduced disposal fees have proved to be a key incentive contributing to the increasing rate of recycling and composting. The NESWC communities, however, have been unable to take advantage of these savings. . .

The construction agreement negotiated between UOP and its subsidiary, MRI, did not protect the interests of the NESWC communities. . .

The Commonwealth's approach to the project failed to protect the interests of the NESWC communities. Although the Commonwealth retained a lawyer to participate in the negotiations, the structure of the contracting arrangement - which allowed the two affiliated corporations to deal with each other - invited abuse. Neither the Commonwealth nor the NESWC communities were parties to the construction contract, nor did the contract allow them any input into the design of the NESWC facility. . .

Evidence surfaced in a subsequent arbitration proceeding that suggests that MRI may have manipulated the acceptance test procedures to conceal design and construction deficiencies at the facility. Weston testified in the arbitration proceeding that because MRI misrepresented certain conditions under which the acceptance test was conducted, Weston was unable to detect the failure to meet a key performance guarantee. . .

NESWC uncovered evidence that MRI might have manipulated the acceptance tests of the NESWC facility to conceal design and construction deficiencies. . . .

This Office obtained from a confidential source copies of correspondence between Wheelabrator and Martin, the manufacturer which designed the boilers, as well as other records produced during arbitration that tend to support the allegations raised by NESWC in the arbitration. This Office has requested from NESWC additional records produced by MRI and others during the arbitration.

MRI has attempted to block this Office's access to those records by seeking an injunction in Superior Court prohibiting NESWC from releasing them. MRI claims that it is entitled to this injunction because the records belong to MRI and were provided under a confidentiality agreement that prohibits NESWC from disclosing their contents. . . .

To date, MRI has succeeded in shrouding in secrecy evidence that may provide a legal basis for a claim by NESWC against MRI. . .

Conclusion

This report focuses on the history of the NESWC project and the terms of the deal that have made it so costly to Massachusetts taxpayers. The NESWC communities were persuaded by low projected solid waste disposal fees to sign 20-year service agreements. These projected fees were developed by the Commonwealth and its technical consultant, who predicted that a continuing rise in oil prices would boost the revenue from the sale of electricity, thereby reducing the disposal fees. The predicted low disposal fees did not materialize. Instead, when the NESWC facility began operation in 1986, the NESWC communities were faced with disposal fees that were far higher than expected - and have continued to climb. The NESWC communities currently pay approximately $95 per ton for waste disposal, nearly twice the current market price for solid waste disposal in the region. The cost is projected to reach $215 per ton by 2004. . .

The NESWC story contains vitally important lessons for all public officials about the potential cost of long-term contractual arrangements that allocate most of the risks to the public sector. . . This Office will continue to investigate the NESWC project and to subject new public-private partnership proposals to the critical scrutiny they warrant.

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In a paper entitled "Advantage: Recycle: Assessing the Full Costs and Benefits of Curbside Recycling, two scientists from the Environmental Defense Fund has set forth data on the advantages of recycling in terms of cost and reduced environmental impacts. One of their important findings:

" The greatest environmental benefits of recycling are related not to landfills, but to the conservation of energy and natural resources and reduction of pollution in manufacturing that result from using recycled raw materials in place of virgin raw materials. Recycled materials have already been refined and processed once, so manufacturing the second time around is usually much cleaner and less energy-intensive than the original process.

Detailed analysis shows that these environmental benefits of recycling far outweigh any additional environmental burdens that result from the collection and transport of recyclable materials. This conclusion holds true across several major recent studies -- including the study by Franklin Associates, Ltd. that the Journal selectively cites -- that compare the environmental impacts of recycled and virgin materials over their entire lifecycles.

For example, Franklin Associates recently examined the lifecycle environmental impacts of recycling the aluminum cans, glass bottles, newspapers, tin-coated steel cans and plastic soda bottles and milk jugs collected in a typical residential curbside program. The study included all component activities of recycling: collection, processing, transport of processed materials back to manufacturers, and remanufacturing. The study also compared these impacts to the impacts from landfilling or incinerating the same items and replacing them with new items made from virgin materials.

After accounting for all of these activities associated with recycling, the study found that, for 10 major categories of air pollutants and 8 major categories of water pollutants, curbside recycling results in a net reduction in all pollutant categories, relative to a system based on virgin materials manufacturing. The same result was found for solid waste generation, whether measured by weight or by volume. In other words, collecting, processing, transporting and manufacturing new products with recovered materials results in less release of air and water pollutants, and less solid waste, than does acquiring and using virgin raw materials in manufacturing. Moreover, releases from recycling were considerably lower than those from landfilling in all pollutant categories, and were lower than those from incineration in almost all categories. "

The article also commented on costs, noting that

"Incinerators are concentrated in the same areas where landfills are most expensive, and across the country regional averages for incinerator fees are about $5 to $20 per ton higher than for landfills, with the largest gap in the regions with the least expensive landfills. Because the construction and ash disposal costs and energy payments for many incinerators are subsidized or not included in the apparent tipping fee, the actual cost of incineration paid by the public can be even higher. . . . According to a major study conducted for Keep America Beautiful, Inc. by the consulting firm of Franklin Associates, Ltd., new incinerators cost 16-31% more than new, large-scale curbside recycling programs."

[Note: EDF articles on recycling can be found on the Internet at http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.html .]

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"Greater Portland's waste disposal costs due to rise " was the title of an article in the Portland Press Herald, Portland, Maine, February 20, 1996. The article noted that since the Regional Waste System (RWS) lost the ability to use low control to force haulers to use its trash-to-energy incinerator, trash hauler's have begun avoiding the costly incinerator. The solution: taxpayer subsidies to the incinerator. Communities would be asked to pay $104.55 per ton of residential trash so that the RWS could "set a competitive rate of about $50 a ton to lure haulers of commercial trash. "

''Flow control is gone, but that doesn't mean we can't come up with an alternative,'' Portland City Mangager Robert Ganley said.

The rate structure will feature a single disposal fee, estimated to be $50. A separate bill of about $54 a ton will be sent to municipalities to cover RWS's remaining operating and debt costs.

A related article noted that RSW was receiving $6 per ton for recyclables that they collected.