On September 3, 2024, Middletown’s Common Council sat for a marathon meeting that went over five hours, at least three hours of which were public comment. Residents and city employees lined up to speak: the city employees were supporting a new labor contract; the others, however, were talking trash. 

For the past two years, the City of Middletown’s sanitation district has participated in a pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) pilot program, using grant money from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), part of the department’s Save Money and Reduce Trash (SMART) program. 

Essentially, in exchange for a reduced flat fee for municipal garbage pickup, residents of Middletown’s sanitation district buy high-priced garbage bags that come in two colors from the city – food scraps go in the green bags and trash goes in the orange bags. The bags are then sorted, with the food scraps going to a waste-to-energy plant in Southington, while the rest of the trash is dumped in the usual manner.

The PAYT program is only for the city’s public sanitation district, which comprises roughly 17 percent of Middletown’s population; the rest of the city residents use private trash haulers. For the city’s sanitation service, residents can generally expect to pay roughly $400 per year, although the rates change depending on tipping fees, which have been increasing year over year. Proponents of the PAYT program believe it will ultimately save residents money and reduce trash in landfills by encouraging recycling and incinerating food waste.

On paper, the program appears to make sense: The City lowers the flat fee for garbage pickup – in Middletown’s case from $400 to $280; the city then sells residents the colored garbage bags to cover the cost of hauling and disposing of the trash. If a resident uses fewer bags, they ultimately save money. The city saves on fees for dumping less garbage, which, in turn, means lower sanitation costs.

Proponents of the program in Middletown say it is meant to stave off Connecticut’s “trash crisis” following DEEP’s closure of the MIRA trash to energy facility in Hartford, forcing Connecticut municipalities to transport roughly 40 percent of its trash out of state to places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, which is far more costly. Sending food scraps to Southington and reducing the trash going out of state means reduced costs, while incinerating that food waste at the nearby Southington facility saves money and generates energy – something Connecticut is also in desperate need of.

There’s only one problem with the PAYT program: No one in Connecticut really likes it – at least in the way Middletown is doing it. 

Stonington has used PAYT for three decades, but thus far, other town officials in Connecticut who have wandered down the PAYT path have faced backlash from residents and have largely let their respective pilot programs fade away. 

Part of the problem is the cost of the trash bags which range in price from 85 cents to $1.50 for a single fifteen-gallon bag; the other is that the town must enforce compliance with the program through fines and monitoring people’s trash. 

In Middletown, enforced compliance means someone in a car examining the contents of people’s trash to ensure they are using the proper orange and green bags before the garbage truck gets there, according to the city’s contract; $30 fines for “systemic non-compliance,” and cameras with artificial intelligence software mounted on trash trucks to catch transgressors. If you’re not using the right bags, in the right way, the garbage is left on the side of the road and that person is issued a fine.

Prior to the marathon Common Council meeting, the council heard from Middletown’s Acting Director of Public Works Howard Weissberg on the PAYT program, who said the pilot program was working great. According to his presentation, the sanitation district had achieved 80 percent compliance, had reduced its waste in the sanitation district by 32 percent, and 47 tons of food scraps had gone to the incinerator.

The progress meant the sanitation district’s annual garbage fee went from $400 per year down to $280 per year, and the city was reducing the price of the bags, from one dollar to 85 cents for a 15-gallon trash bag, thanks to the support of $197,000 in extra grant funding paid for by tax dollars from across the state.

“We have seen really extraordinary success over the past year in terms of reducing the waste we are producing in that district, we have seen extraordinary success in being able to head off those fee increases, those annual rate increases that other districts and other municipalities are experiencing,” Mayor Benjamin Florsheim, a proponent of the PAYT program, said. “We have seen a great partnership from the State of Connecticut to keep this program going as we determine whether it is a good fit ultimately for Middletown.”

However, as people lined up to speak on the subject, they were sharply divided: supporters of the program said it helped them take more notice of the amount of trash they used, allowing them to reduce their waste. Secondly, they argued that the PAYT program meant they were no longer “subsidizing” the costs of people who create a lot of waste – they used less trash, so they paid less, rather than the prior choice to pay a flat fee to cover everybody.

Those who spoke out against the PAYT system often received applause from the crowded public meeting as they asked the council to do away with the program, arguing it can potentially raise rents on tenants, that the bags break easily when full, that trash barrels are overflowing in the street, and that the city is policing residents’ trash with a heavy hand.

“It’s a very flawed system and it’s not fair to us that you’re dictating what we need to use,” said Erin Gueveras. “You’re policing us, you have people going through our garbage and they put a sticker on it saying you failed today, you did the wrong thing.”

“I’m not sure why you want to antagonize people with a fine,” resident Jim Dunn said to the Common Council. “People got very upset a couple months ago when there was talk of trash police. We got an email or a text or something insisting there was no such thing as trash police. But if you got somebody going through your trash and potentially issuing fines, call them what you will, but they’re trash police.”

An online petition to end Middletown’s PAYT program started by one of the speakers, Yuri Branzburg, gathered 495 signatures and labels the program “an institutional injustice,” because it affects city residents who have limited economic means while the rest of the city continues to throw away their trash in the usual manner through private haulers. He argues the program is “undemocratic,” “crony-capitalism” foisted upon residents who have little choice but to use the city’s trash pickup or, in this case, participate in the program.

“The most vulnerable residents of our community are suffering due to the current state of affairs in our sanitation district,” the petition says. “The city has callously disregarded our concerns and marginalized us; so now it is time to stand up and be counted!”

Sanitation district residents can opt out of the city’s trash pickup, but they still have to pay a fee of $150 per year to the city and then find a private garbage company willing to go into the sanitation district — a difficult prospect according to Rick Sciena, a former Middletown police officer turned private investigator who, together with Branzburg, has led the charge against the PAYT program. Siena is currently paying $150 per year to have someone NOT pick up his trash.

Sciena and Branzburg are skeptical of the entire premise of Middletown’s PAYT program, debating whether there truly is a trash crisis in Connecticut — or at least one that wasn’t self-imposed by shutting down MIRA without having a backup plan. But what they’re really focused on are the expensive trash bags people must buy from select locations. 

“Something’s just not right here. Why are the bags so important?” Sciena said during an interview. 

There’s nothing special about the bags other than their cost. They’re not biodegradable, or in any way different from an ordinary trash bag, but residents cannot, for instance, purchase cheaper green and orange garbage bags online for separating food scraps and trash – that would be deemed noncompliance because the city is relying on the bag revenue to pay the cost of picking up and hauling the trash. 

While the price of the bags supports the city’s sanitation costs, it also serves a secondary purpose: the prices are prohibitive to change behavior. People are less likely to be wasteful if the trash bags cost a dollar or two per bag and more likely to recycle or separate their food scraps.

But Sciena and Branzburg argue the whole program is not designed to help sanitation district residents save money or to reduce waste, but rather to enrich one company – WasteZero, the North Carolina-based company that makes the expensive trash bags residents are required to buy. WasteZero is a certified Class B corporation, meaning they meet standards for social and environmental performance, and is a long-time consultant for the State of Connecticut on waste reduction. 

Between 2019 and 2023, Connecticut taxpayers paid WasteZero $713,000 in consulting fees, according to the state’s open data records. Some of that came from federal funds, some of it came from Connecticut’s General Fund, and at least two of the contracts with WasteZero were no-bid contracts, according to the Office of Policy and Management’s 2022 Personal Services Report.

WasteZero’s CEO Mark Dancy, along with Vice President Kristen Brown, have been making the rounds to municipalities pushing the PAYT program with DEEP as a way to save money and reduce waste. Municipalities will often present slides and information touting the benefits of PAYT to the public that have been prepared by WasteZero, a company that stands to benefit from implementation of the program.

Having the state’s consultant be a for-profit company that would financially benefit from town’s switching to PAYT sets the table for concerns – not just in Middletown – that the program is less about saving money for residents and more about using state and municipal government to the benefit of single preferred company.

“WasteZero does all of the heavy lifting,” Branzburg said. “This company makes money off the bags.”  

“They don’t care about the environment, this is all a big money grab,” Sciena said.

The PAYT pilot program pushed by DEEP and adopted by Middletown is also sometimes referred to as Save As You Throw, because both the municipality and the residents will, in theory, save money through diverting food scraps, recycling more, and creating less trash.

The pilot program was initially funded through the 2021 budget with $5 million in carry forward funds to “develop and implement a program to support solid waste reduction strategies,” including “organic materials diversion, unit-based pricing, and reuse and recycling strategies, among others,” to meet the state’s 2014 goal of reducing solid waste by 60 percent by 2024 through diversion – recycling and organic waste digestion.

Middletown applied for and received a $350,000 grant in October 2022 to implement a pilot program with WasteZero, part of the $750,000 provided by DEEP to Middletown since 2022 to “implement a cutting-edge sustainable materials management program,” according to a presentation by the city’s Department of Public Works.

Phase 1 of the program, which ran from 2022 to 2023, provided free orange and green bags to residents, introduced them to the program, and collected feedback. Following that initial phase, it morphed into a mandatory program in which residents had to purchase the bags or risk not having their trash picked up or face fines for noncompliance. 

Following phase 1 the city contracted with WasteZero to move forward with full, mandatory implementation for the following year, which included WasteZero essentially doing everything but collecting the trash: outreach events to raise awareness, hosting a website, tracking and analyzing data, providing feedback to the state and the city, social media messaging, waste audits, and, interestingly, providing an employee 20 hours per month to follow garbage trucks and “check on participation/compliance,” according to a December 2023 contract.

According to figures provided by the city, of the $750,000 in state grant funds for the first two phases of the program, WasteZero received $210,000 — $28,400 of which was for general program management and the rest for purchasing the trash bags.

WasteZero sells the bags to Middletown at a cost of 28 cents per bag for a typical 15-gallon orange trash bag; 15-gallon bags appear to be somewhat rare – most trash bags listed online are 13-gallon — and Costco sells 13-gallon bags for 10 cents per bag and 18-gallon trash bags for 26 cents per bag.

Although slightly more expensive than Costco, the WasteZero bags are branded specifically to Middletown to ensure they were purchased from the city and thus covered the cost of hauling and disposing of the trash. The green food scrap bags are both cheaper and smaller, with an 8-gallon bag costing the city 21 cents per bag and being sold for 25 cents, to encourage diverting food out of the waste stream. A ledger of bag sales shows the city sold $79,893.30 worth of trash bags between March 18, 2024, and September 24, 2024.

In exchange for implementing the PAYT system, the city lowered the annual trash fee for residents of the sanitation district from $400 per year to $280, saying that residents can save money by throwing away less and recycling more, and this is where the savings become questionable.

According to numbers supplied by WasteZero and presented by the City of Middletown, the average family of four can be expected to use two kitchen-sized trash bags per week for garbage. By the city’s calculations, over the course of 2024 a family in the sanitation district that uses two orange bags per week for trash and one green bag per week for food scraps can expect their annual trash bill to be $397 per year – a savings of three dollars. Obviously, the fewer bags the more savings – one orange bag and one green bag per week saves $55 per year.

Use two extra orange bags per year and your garbage fee has essentially gone up; catch a $30 fine for not using the bags and it will take a while for the savings to equal out. 

However, as indicated before, the Common Council approved another year of the program and reduced the cost of the orange bags by 15 cents, so that same family of four could see savings of $18.60 per year, but the city also claims that without the PAYT program, the annual trash service fee would have increased to $480 per year – so, hypothetically, the potential savings from the program in 2025 would be $99.

However, that reduction in the price of the bags was only possible through another $197,000 in grant money supplied by DEEP, bolstering state taxpayers’ subsidy of Middletown’s PAYT plan to $945,000 since 2022. The city says that it reduced waste tonnage by 800 tons and saved $100,000 in disposal fees in the first year of the program.  

There is also the enforcement problem; WasteZero can’t send people around chasing garbage trucks indefinitely, so the city has outfitted their garbage truck cameras with artificially intelligent software for $18,000 that will scan the trash bins as they are raised into the garbage truck to ensure there are only official orange and green bags inside. 

Among the DPW’s recommendations to the Common Council was, “Continue with enforcement using cameras to identify chronic violators and ground teams to verify non-compliance.” 

Not all PAYT programs are created equally, and some tend to be more popular or gain public acceptance more quickly. There are basically two different kinds of PAYT: one requires residents who drop off their trash at the municipal transfer station to purchase town garbage bags; the other, like Middletown’s, requires residents to purchase the garbage bags which are then picked up by curbside haulers. Of the two, the former appears more popular and more easily accepted.

In presentations to municipalities, DEEP and WasteZero often point out that 156 municipalities in Massachusetts use a PAYT system, which accounts for roughly 44 percent of Massachusetts’s 351 municipalities. 

According to numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, of those 156 municipalities using PAYT, 97 are for drop off at the transfer station, 48 are curbside pickup, and 11 are both. Of the 799,392 households listed in the municipalities, 527,825 are actually served by the PAYT program, meaning they either utilize the drop-off or curbside pick-up. Massachusetts also has numerous bag vendors under state contract, WasteZero only being one of them.

PAYT programs are also not new, even in Connecticut. Stonington, for instance, has had PAYT curbside pickup since 1992 in which residents purchase bags from the town and the trash hauler collects those bags. According to a 2003 report by the Office of Legislative Research, Stonington residents were initially resistant to the idea, but it did survive a town referendum in 1994 and is often pointed to by DEEP when arguing the feasibility of the program to other towns.

Mansfield also uses a PAYT program for both curbside pick-up or transfer drop-off, but they also use different disposal methods: residents can purchase a bag or a canister for pickup for a monthly fee. Groton implemented PAYT for drop off at its transfer station, but, according to the OLR report, at the time only 400 families out of 15,000 used it – the rest hired private haulers.

East Lyme implemented a curbside pick-up program in 1992, but it apparently proved unpopular, as the opposing political party won election in 1998 and scrapped the program. 

Coventry also had a PAYT program like what is being implemented in Middletown, however, the town eventually altered their PAYT program, earning them a “Case Study to Learn From” by DEEP – basically, what not to do.

In 2010, Coventry switched from trash bags to hauling carts. According to DEEP’s numbers, this switch increased municipal solid waste by 38 percent over seven years, increased tipping fees by 55 percent, and thus increased household costs. According to DEEP, high-priced municipal trash bags are more effective at curbing waste.

John Elsesser, the former town manager of Coventry who is now retired, said the change was in response to practical issues: ensuring that town bags were being used for pick-up involved extra work by the haulers to inspect the trash bins; selling the bags and collecting money by town retailers was cumbersome; and bears and other animals would often tear up the bags.

He says the town switched to trash carts that are priced based on size so it still ensures residents are paying for what they throw, and that recycling carts are free, which encourages residents to recycle. 

“We made the decision slowly, rationally, but this is the best for us, and we think it still makes people think about the volume they throw out,” Elsesser said in an interview. “You’re still paying for what you throw, but instead of stuffing it in a bag which may be half full or over-bursting, you’re going to just the tipper barrel and cutting the plastic [trash bags] out of the waste stream.”

He also believes criticism of Coventry’s change is tied to the fact that DEEP’s consultant company sells the trash bags. “The company they use as a consultant sells the bags,” Elsesser said. “No conflict, right? Anyway, it’s just more plastic.”

Also listed as a case study in what not to do was the town of Columbia, which in 2010 did a trial run with PAYT for drop off at their transfer station with WasteZero supplying the bags – showing just how far back DEEP’s relationship with WasteZero goes. In this case, residents didn’t like it and felt they were being double-taxed, according to DEEP’s report, which said residents didn’t realize “that their property taxes for trash disposal were now being allocated on other community services.”

In 2020, First Selectman of Greenwich Fred Camillo spent his first year in office trying to implement a PAYT program in Greenwich as way to help solve a $5 million deficit, but the idea was met with public backlash and the Greenwich RTM ultimately shot it down. 

His attempts to push the program through were met with allegations that he would personally benefit from the deal because he had previously been in the waste business; that a DEEP employee pitching the program was married to someone working for WasteZero (Inside Investigator has been unable to verify that allegation); and that it would essentially be a monopoly with only one choice of bag and company. There were numerous op-eds published in the paper lambasting Camillo’s efforts.

“It just became death by a thousand cuts,” Camillo said in an interview. “From what I remember, it was forcing them to use the bags, the lack of choice of company, the close connection between the person at DEEP and the company.”

“I preferred it. I wish we could have led on that one, but I’m only one person,” Camillo said. “Unless the program has changed materially, I don’t want to go down that road again. Especially if towns have tried the program and walked away – that would be brought up immediately if we tried it again. It’s not a winning argument right now, but it was too bad. I thought it was an opportunity.”

According to new reports, however, the trash issues continue in Greenwich, as residents debate the tipping fees for private haulers as opposed to the cost of dropping off their trash at the transfer station.

Camillo’s run at implementing PAYT in Greenwich was prior to DEEP’s grant program, which awarded grants to fifteen municipalities – with mixed results. While these programs were traditional PAYT programs, they also included food scrap diversion to reduce the weight of the trash and thus the tipping fees by sending organics to anaerobic digester in Southington.

Meriden was the first to announce they received the grant and would be implementing a PAYT throw curbside pick-up program with 1,000 families participating in the pilot program. DEEP issued a press release praising the success of the program, but following the pilot, it was quietly dropped. Neither the Meriden mayor nor the director of public works responded to a request for comment as to why.

Waiting in the wings and watching how the PAYT pilot program played out in towns like Meriden, was Rocky Hill, another early recipient of a “significant amount of money” from DEEP’s grant program. According to Mayor Lisa Marotta, Rocky Hill officials hired their own consultant to examine the policy and help with the application process, but in the end never accepted the grant money because the program wasn’t feasible for the town.

“What we found out is we would be hauling our trash in one direction and hauling our organics in the other direction to Southington, and it was just cost prohibitive to do that,” Marotta said in an interview. “And the other thing the council felt strongly about was that pay as you throw component, and we really didn’t want taxpayers to be forced into that type of structure. That’s something that we would want them to do freely so that everyone participates because they actually want to participate. Those are the things we struggled with and ultimately determined unanimously not to move forward.”

“I think we were one of the first to be rewarded and we were awarded a significant amount of money, so it was crushing not to be able to accept that,” Marotta said. “We sort of hung back to see how Meriden and other municipalities were doing and when we didn’t see the results we were anticipating, that’s when we really took a deeper look at what we were doing and what we would be asking our taxpayers to do.”

Likewise, West Hartford was awarded a grant but ultimately turned it down in 2024 when no one on the Town Council voted in favor of the pilot program. West Hartford had been down this road before, having been awarded a grant in 2016 to implement a PAYT program with WasteZero. They tried it and then rejected it.

According to a report by DEEP, in 2016 one-third of the town agreed with the PAYT concept; one-third wanted a different solution; and one-third wanted the public works director fired for even suggesting it. The report said social media “hijacked the narrative,” and cited a lack of trust as to whether there really is a trash crisis (this was before MIRA shut down) and the fact that WasteZero produces the bags, “leaving the impression this was beyond just waste.”

West Hartford’s 2016 experiment with PAYT came to the forefront in 2021, when the legislature’s Environment Committee considered a bill to mandate PAYT for all municipalities, an idea that was shot down by House Speaker Matthew Ritter, D-Hartford, who referenced West Hartford’s experience in comments to the Hartford Courant.

“Let me get this straight,” Ritter told The Courant. “They tried this in West Hartford, which is a very environmentally conscious community, and [Mayor] Shari Cantor said it was the hardest thing she ever tried to do. So now they want the legislature to force every town to do this?”

Torrington Mayor Elinor Carbone in the same article said it was “a death knell for any politician,” in an election year. Instead, Ritter said he would be agreeable to “incentives with subsidies,” which is likely how DEEP’s grant program came to be.

According to a 2024 “Trash Reduction Readiness Survey” for West Hartford’s Department of Public Works, the majority of West Hartford residents thought the town should reduce its waste, recycle more, and implement food scrap collection, but the clear majority also said they preferred no changes to the town’s waste system over PAYT by a 61 to 39 margin.

Among some of the reasons for opposing the change, residents cited increasing taxes and declining waste management services, an unfair burden on large families or low-income households, and a lack of trust in town leadership. 

Ansonia was an early adopter of the pilot program but chose not to move forward following completion of the pilot in July of 2023, according to a final grant report by the Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments (NVCOG). That report noted some successes of the program – a 17 percent reduction in waste and 44 percent diversion rate for recycling and food scraps – but also noted some challenges, including a mistake early in the process which cut the program’s timeline short; an apparent breakdown in communication between the city, DEEP, NVCOG, and WasteZero; and online “misinformation.”

“Misinformation and negative back-and forth on Facebook promulgated a bad reputation for the pilot and might have swayed the opinions of Aldermen,” the report by NVCOG Environmental Planner Christine O’Neill. “The City acknowledges that a pay-as-you-throw or unit-based pricing (UBP) program could fund the continuation of the organics diversion efforts from the pilot. However, it is the belief of City staff and officials that UBP is not a good fit for Ansonia. Due to Ansonia’s status as an economically distressed and environmental justice community, any program that would put a financial burden on residents is unlikely to gain enough support for implementation.”

West Haven ended their curbside pickup pilot program after one year due to low participation rates and an unwillingness to mandate the program for all residents. 

In Seymour, garbage truck drivers reportedly refused to work with WasteZero staff to “indicate whether the green and orange bags were being used,” according to a final report by NVCOG. Seymour declined to continue the program. “WZ also reported that when contractors were sent out to manually check the bins as an alternative way to obtain the data, they were threatened by an individual and had to stop data collection for their safety,” the report said.

While it appears towns that used curbside PAYT programs declined to follow through, other towns that used a drop off system at the municipal transfer station appeared to have better results. Madison and Guilford, both grant recipients, implemented a permanent PAYT system for their transfer station. Newtown has extended the pilot program for a second year in which residents pay for a permit to drop off at the transfer station and in return get a set number of orange bags and can buy more if they need them; recycling is free.

But even the transfer drop-off PAYT program has found resistance outside of municipal and state officials. The Town of Deep River, one of the 2022 DEEP grant award winners, voted at a special meeting in December of 2023 not to implement a PAYT program for their transfer station by a margin of 280 to 94. Woodbridge, on the other hand, was approved for a grant for PAYT at their transfer station but ultimately declined to accept it.

Woodbury successfully implemented a PAYT program for their transfer station, where roughly one-third of residents bring their trash, according to Richard Coates, chairman of Woodbury’s Waste Advisory Ad Hoc Committee. The town made the transfer station permit stickers free and residents now had to buy orange and green bags to drop trash at the station under a three-year contract between Woodbury and WasteZero, in which the bag prices increase roughly 2 percent each year.

But that doesn’t mean implementation was easy. According to Coates there were a few people on social media who were very public in their opposition to the program; some families switched to private haulers, and some felt PAYT was tantamount to a tax increase, similar to Columbia’s experience with PAYT at their transfer station.

“I think there are two levels of misunderstanding,” Coates said. “Some people didn’t understand why they needed to pay for more expensive orange bags instead of regular Hefty bags, but once we explained that you’re paying to dispose of the stuff, they were like ‘Okay,’ that makes sense, it won’t be coming out of my tax dollars.”

It is a tax increase, albeit a small one, however; the savings to the town are too small, too easily consumed by bigger ticket items like the school budget, to be put back in the pockets of residents. Instead, they will have to rest assured that at least their tax dollars are going toward something other than trash.

“We’re talking about a couple hundred thousand here,” Coates said of the savings to the town. “The school costs you $29 million, so a tiny percentage increase in the school budget is going to completely wipe that out.”

Overall, Coates says the PAYT program for Woodbury’s transfer station was a success, particularly with diverting organics to nearby Southington.

“We’ve seen a dramatic decrease in this last three months in the amount of trash that’s being produced by people,” Coates said in an interview. “We’re down 40 percent, 47 percent less trash, so we have 53 percent of the trash that we had before the pilot program started. We’re collecting 10 tons of food waste.”

So out of 15 municipalities awarded grants by DEEP for PAYT and food scrap diversion pilot programs, only six, or roughly one-third, have chosen to continue the pilot into a second year. Of those six, only Middletown is doing so through curbside pickup and all the enforcement that goes with it.

Nevertheless, DEEP officials see the program as a success resulting in 2.5 million pounds of food scraps diverted to Southington, a 10 percent decrease in trash going to landfills, and a 25 percent increase in recycling in those municipalities. In October, the state doubled down on the program, bonding $10 million for more grants to municipalities – a move supported by both of Connecticut’s municipal associations, whose leaders have been looking for ways to lower the cost of waste for years.

“The results from the pilots are quite compelling,” said Deputy Commissioner of Environmental Quality Emma Cimino. “We saw significant diversion from the pilots, and so I think that, you know, we’ll continue to do our outreach and continue to try to help municipalities meet their own goals.”

Cimino says the primary goal of the program is diversion of organic waste, which makes up a sizeable portion of the weight of trash, and thus helps lower the per-ton tipping fees for towns. According to numbers supplied by DEEP, the average tipping fee for trash is $100 per ton, whereas for food scraps its $60 per ton.

“Connecticut is struggling to handle its municipal solid waste within the state, we’re trucking more and more waste out of state, and that is a high and increasing cost for many municipalities. Organic waste food scrap waste is a very large share of municipal solid waste,” Cimino said. “We have a goal of offering municipalities tools to reduce the waste they’re shipping out and ultimately their cost. We kind of put these dollars on the street and it was really up to towns what strategies they wanted to pursue.”

And while officials see the program as a success to be capitalized upon, they also acknowledge that uptake hasn’t quite been what they hoped for — the cost of the bags giving residents some “sticker shock.”

“A lot of these costs are invisible to the average resident, right? They kind of just pay their taxes and that’s where these waste charges are kind of just built in,” Cimino said. “People are not paying for the bag per se but paying for their waste to be processed and handled, and I think that was part of the sticker shock, was just having a portion of that cost broken out.”

DEEP officials also deny they are pushing municipalities toward using WasteZero for supplying the bags, saying they encourage municipalities to go out to bid for the bag services. “Just to be clear, WasteZero is a consultant on a list of consultants that municipalities are free to work with,” Cimino said. “To be clear, we never directed towns to purchase bags from WasteZero.”

However, they claim WasteZero has a “unique” skill set and experience in this area, particularly now that organic waste diversion is the goal. It is a somewhat new program, and certainly new for Connecticut, and there aren’t a lot of consultants doing that kind of work. DEEP has been working with WasteZero “on and off” for over decade, DEEP believes the company is best qualified to analyze municipal waste and offer solutions.

“They have expertise to work with towns take a look at their tonnage numbers, what their costs are, kind of analyze them and make recommendations for a town, how they might want to move forward, and what sorts of cost shifts they might see by implementing different programs,” said Chris Nelson, supervising environmental analyst for DEEP. “I think towns find it helpful because the towns are not able to do that analysis themselves.”

Naturally, however, those reports tout benefits and savings from implementing a PAYT program utilizing bags that can be – not must be – supplied by WasteZero. Towns likely see moving forward with the state’s long-time consultant as likely the easiest route to take, but it also feeds into the public perception that this is less for the public’s benefit – who either face enforcement measures through fines, cameras, and people rooting through their trash, or are essentially paying more for dropping their trash at the transfer station – than for the benefit of a single contractor.

The more visible the costs and the more inconvenient the waste system becomes, the less interested people are in participating, and as indicated in several of the interviews and reports, it is easy for the public to draw a clear line from that increased inconvenience or cost to a company that is making money from it.

“You always get conspiracy theorists who were convinced that we were all getting kickbacks from somebody, and you know it was it was just a great effort to extract more money from them,” Coates said of the PAYT program in Woodbury. 

Vice President of WasteZero Kristen Brown says that it is “fear of change,” and “fear that this will cost me more personally,” that pushes many people to oppose the PAYT programs.

“The good news is once City/Town officials and residents experience the results and overcome the fear of change – the program makes sense. No one wants to pay for their neighbor’s trash,” Brown wrote in an email. “I have been working in recycling for over 35 years and most my time has been specifically on PAYT programs. It is a very political process, but I will say that in all my time I have never seen a program that did not significantly reduce waste and therefore save money.”

Brown points to not only other New England states but other countries like Switzerland, Belgium, Korea, and Taiwan, as examples, saying PAYT programs generally reduce trash between 30 and 65 percent.

“This is not about a limited number of pilot programs that tried a ‘voluntary’ UBP [Unit Based Pricing] pilot with limited results and decided not to continue,” Brown wrote. “DEEP’s effort is about demonstrating the merit of UBP and about the sustained results of UBP programs all over the country and the world.”

“Traditionally, trash has been a socialized system where no one has any accountability, and this creates inefficient outcomes,” Brown wrote. “Many people or groups have a vested interest in more waste. The savings the Cities and Towns generate means less revenue for the waste industry. Everyone feels like an expert on trash, for some reason it is very personal.”

Brown also says that — as indicated in prior reports — social media “gets people upset,” with posts “that are not accurate or outright lies,” but says that municipalities have no obligation to partner with WasteZero following the initial pilot program.

“We have decades of experience with program implementation. Once a municipality has completed the implementation phase of UBP / PAYT they are not required to use WasteZero bags,” Brown wrote. “There are plenty of manufacturers that can provide bags. WasteZero provides implementation services in the first year or two, which is what we have been doing for Middletown.”

Those implementation services, however, are fairly extensive: monitoring compliance, getting bags to retailers, auditing food scraps bag contents for compliance, outreach and marketing, and collecting feedback from residents, according to Brown.

“Once the city is fully launched, and they no longer need implementation services they can choose a different partner for bags if they wish,” Brown wrote.

The costs for Connecticut’s trash don’t appear to be going down anytime soon, according to officials from DEEP. As indicated before, even as early as 2016 and 2017, DEEP was touting a “waste crisis,” and that was before MIRA shut down forcing 40 percent of Connecticut’s waste to be shipped out of state. But keeping MIRA going also would have been a significant cost – upwards of $350 million, according to Cimino.

“MIRA took a significant portion of municipal solid waste and so when that closed without anything really to replace it, that’s definitely a driver of what we’re seeing now,” Cimino said.

It isn’t just the cost of trash that is rising, either. China stopped accepting recyclables from the United States in 2018, driving up the cost of recycling. That, however, has been met with more U.S. recycling infrastructure with new and better technology, according to Nelson. “Maybe once that new infrastructure is in place to handle,say, paper recycling or plastic recycling the tipping fees will go down,” Nelson said. “It’s an evolving thing.”

Also evolving is what DEEP will do with the $10 million in bonded funds, and how they will be made available to municipalities, which Cimino says she is “extremely excited about.” 

“I think the need for towns to have more tools available to them is clear, it’s not going anywhere, we know that tipping fees will just continue to rise,” Cimino said. “But there’s a few things we’re planning to do with that funding outside of the next round of grants.” 

One of those things outside of grant funding is updating the Statewide Waste Characterization Study, a massive report analyzing Connecticut’s waste stream that hasn’t been updated since 2015.

“Compliance assistance was a huge component for a lot of these towns, so really educating residents on what the pilot meant, what they had to do,” Cimino said. “I think that that these kind of things — enforcement and compliance assistance — are aspects of any new program. I think we see those often as a tool to make sure that the residents understand.”

“A 40 percent residential trash reduction in Connecticut (whose taxpayers pay the highest tipping rates on the East Coast) would save residents approximately $70 million per year — even more as tipping fees continue to rise,” Brown wrote. “This is an initiative worth considering.”

The forward-facing cost of the program for a select group of Middletown residents who happen to live in the sanitation district combined with the enforcement measures, have some Middletown residents wanting to toss the whole sanitation district in the trash. They understand the program, they just don’t like it and want to be set free from the sanitation district to handle their own waste removal.

Middletown resident Jody Demere asked the Common Council on September 3 to dissolve the sanitation district: “Get rid of it, because it’s unnecessary, and it’s hurting a lot of people.”

“People… they’re upset, they’re angry. We’ve heard data that’s been skewed, and people go home, and they talk in groups, they text, there’s whole sites that talk about garbage because of the sanitation district,” Demere said. “I think I’m a little bit tired of being a lab rat, because I didn’t sign up for it.”

Middletown resident Douglas Pierce told the Common Council that this “trash fiasco has to end.”

“I understand the concept of recycling and I agree with recycling, but I do not agree with this program at all,” Pierce said. “We’re gonna end up spending more money, more time, and more energy than we really need to. We need to spend our money wisely. We took a $750,000 grant from the state of Connecticut. Where did that money go? Who knows. We need to end this program tonight. End the insanity.”

Insanity or not, Middletown’s PAYT program did not end that night. Common Council members voted 8-4 to continue with the now mandatory program, using more DEEP funds to lower the cost of the sanitation district fee and bag prices. 

“I would say that I believe this program works. I know that I personally think very differently about how I throw out trash,” said Councilman Kovach, a member of the sanitation district. “I think this resolution and this change in the program is a step in the right direction. I believe lowering the bag fee will create less of a burden on the population that has to use this service.”

Councilwoman Blackwell said she didn’t want to hold up approval of the project but did express some concerns with the program, including the fees and noncompliance fines. Councilwoman Sweeney said, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and that the program was “progressive, but also flawed; progressive and also promising.”

“I think the program is more flawed than what we’re gaining from it for the 17 percent of the people who live in the district,” Councilwoman Linda Salafia said. “It’s a big problem. I think it’s time now to pull the plug.”

The extended program will run from November 2024 until November 2025, after which DEEP’s funding will run out, and Middletown may find itself having to raise the prices of the bags or the sanitation district fee to keep up with the tipping fees. According to Middletown’s own numbers, were it not for DEEP’s grant money, they couldn’t have lowered the price of the trash bags.

“The sanitation district is a monopoly,” Branzburg said. “They can do what they want, and when we complain about it and say this program harms me, the incentive is not there for them to change or do anything to help anybody.”

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