AUBURN — Curbside recycling might be gone for a while, according to city officials.
Public Works Director Denis D’Auteuil said residents may need to get used to taking their recycling to one of two collection points for as long as a year, when a new curbside recycling program could start.
“Our goal has always been to have a much-improved, updated recycling program by 2014,” D’Auteuil said.
In the meantime, residents need to find some other way to deal with their collected newspaper, glass, plastic trash and cans.
The city has set up two dumpsters, one at Mid Maine Waste Action Corp.’s Goldthwaite Road facility and a second at the Public Works shop on Gracelawn Road.
The MMWAC dumpster will be open during regular operating hours: 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 7 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.
The Public Works dumpster, near the sand shed, will be open 24 hours daily.
Anything residents left curbside before can go in those dumpsters now — with an added benefit. They don’t have to be sorted.
Auburn began offering the dual-sort recycling program in September 2011, offering curbside collections twice each month. The plan was to put fibrous recycling — paper and cardboard — in a different bin than plastic, metal and glass. A city-owned truck was sent out to collect those materials four weeks each month. Some neighborhoods had their recycling collected on the first and third weeks, others on the second and fourth.
Lewiston began offering single-stream recycling in 2011, and Auburn City Councilors discussed following suit this spring.
City Manager Clinton Deschene said staff might be able to negotiate, contract and restart curbside recycling before 2014.
“We would take the time, but we would come back with a much bigger, much better recycling program,” Deschene said.
It would be a single-container program, with contractors giving residents a special big bin to hold all their recycling. Materials would be collected each week using an automated truck.
“We’ve talked with contractors, and they would need at least three to six months to ramp up and to get the new containers out to residents,” Deschene said. “I think the earliest we could start the new system would be January 2014. But if we do that, it might make sense to wait until July 2014 and just start fresh.”
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