BERLIN – The town’s visiting environmental professionals shared their ideas on ways to increase recycling in a presentation to municipal officials last week.
Pradnya Rahmani and Xyla Gualberto, visiting Berlin through the International City/County Management Association Professional Fellows Program, offered their thoughts on the town’s current recycling operations and suggestions on ways to increase participation rates among residents.
“I asked them to take a look at it,” said Town Administrator Laura Allen. “We have mandatory recycling but not a great recycling rate.”
Rahmani said that currently, roughly 40 percent of Berlin residents were recycling. She said the town needed to launch a campaign to increase that rate and perhaps even offer incentives to encourage people to recycle. She said she’d also like to see the town begin to offer composting.
She pointed out that the town’s solid waste collection vehicles were sophisticated and proved to be highly efficient in picking up trash and recycling. Nevertheless, she said she’d seen the trash trucks pick up items that should have been recycled.
“Maybe the recyclables mixed in the refuse should be taken out,” she said.
Rahmani said she’d also visited the county’s central landfill during her time in Berlin and suggested that was a trip residents could make. She said seeing the facility might encourage them to recycle.
“Maybe now they don’t have a problem with land scarcity but in the future they will have,” she said.
Following Rahmani’s recommendations, Gualberto spoke to the group about ways to communicate the importance of recycling to residents. She said an information education communication campaign could be successful in sharing the message with the public. Aspects of that would include a survey to gauge the community’s understanding of issues such as composting and recycling as well as the release of promotional materials. Social media could play a key part in the process through the use of teasers and trivia questions and contests.
“Create a buzz that will get people asking,” Gualberto said.
She said targeting a message to children could also convince adults to change their behavior and place more importance on recycling. Other ways to involve children, she said, could include community projects. They could help collect recyclables or do art projects using recyclable materials.
One of Gualberto’s suggestions that particularly interested Allen was the concept of recycling bins with small holes in the shape of what they were meant to accept. A recycling bin for cans, for example, would have a can-shaped hole at the top through which people could deposit cans. Gualberto explained that those recycling bins had been proven to increase recycling by roughly 33 percent.
“You will pause to think ‘what should fit here,’” she explained.
Gualberto and Rahmani, whose last day in Berlin was Nov. 11, said they’d enjoyed their visit and thanked town officials.
“We feel very blessed and very fortunate to be assigned to this town,” Gualberto said. “Everyone has been really kind to us, helping us, going out of their way to give us a meaningful experience. It’s really something that we will take back to our home communities. We’re very, very thankful.”
