Salem Recycles committee meeting
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Present: Lynn Murray, Robin Faulling, Jennifer Percy, Erin Huggard, Julie Rose, Liz Vago, Marcia Lambert, Susan Yochelson, Nancy Gilberg, Penny Neal,
Absent: Tony Keck, Brad Backer
Introduction of Robin Faulling, prospective new committee member.
Next Events:
Book Swap is September 10 from 10-1 at St. Anne’s church school. We have been getting some nice publicity: Salem News, and the Lynn ArtThrob, who tweeted it today also. Lynn has distributed information around the Point neighborhood. Julie has heard good feedback about our inclusion of greeting cards last event. Nancy offers a suggestion that the phrasing of “no dealers before noon” would be nicer as “dealers welcome after noon” and committee generally agrees. Julie adds that “collectors” don’t think of themselves as dealers. She will post signs for dealers at the room entry.
We expect to be downstairs in the large back room of the school building again. We will try to count attendees this swap. General discussion to summarize what tasks we will be doing on the swap day, for those of us volunteering for the first time. Our volunteer schedule is passed around for confirmation. We will identify ourselves with our green SalemRecycles aprons and with nametags. Church volunteers or boy scouts will help break down the room and deal with leftover books.
Green Salem website update: It is live now though still being worked on. Meghan, Julie’s intern, did an enormous amount of work helping get it together. We also want to acknowledge our partnership with Salem Cyberspace for this site. Right now Salem Cyberspace will make corrections/changes, and Lynn and Julie will be receiving training on editing it. If any of us see or think of additions, we will email the info to Lynn. She will aggregate this info. We have content mostly from our committee as yet, though we are looking for input from Paul Marquis, and from the Renewable Energy Task Force. We hope they will be inspired after seeng the site, to contribute. Lynn would like to amass a stockpile of images that can be rotated through the site; videos as well. Content needs to be
streamed through Lynn/Julie so that it can be vetted for appropriateness. We will not have a blog. Discussion about the possibility of posting listings from people who are seeking materials. Erin discusses listings on Earth911 for Salem area recycling. There were mistakes on this site concerning the household hazardous waste collection days that Salem and Beverly are sharing. Erin or Julie will seek to correct these errors. This new site will be rolled out slowly as content is finalized. Discussion of when/how to roll it out: maybe to coincide with America Recycles Day November 15th? Nancy suggests buttons with the URL that we can wear for the Haunted Happenings Parade. Liz suggests we create a timeline of what is involved and when we need to do it. Discussion of rollout schedule: Julie: Buttons with URL may not be seen in the dark at the parade; maybe we should make a banner or sign containing the URL to promote it. Will we be ready by then? Liz—we should get our
comments/corrections to Lynn by September 17th . Typos/broken links/corrections will have priority in this effort. We agree that a contact person’s info should be easily findable on the site.
Green Business Challenge Update: Julie—over 53 very enthusiastic people/businesses are participating; most of them are new to this year. One-on-one outreach by Julie seems to have had a significant impact. Thursday 9/15 is the awards ceremony at Old Town Hall for the winners in each category, at 4 pm. The mayor will be present; our state reps are invited but not confirmed. Julie outlines some new ideas for next year that are being considered; among them, getting the program going earlier in the year, ways to streamline the re-entry process for repeat entries from one year to the next, and ways to improve the “cling” sticker received by winners. Susan mentions that she ran into Julie all over town, promoting this event; Julie did a lot of work on this. Discussion of how
consumers can help spread the word, driving businesses to try and be more green. Susan suggests the kickoff to next year’s program might be well done with a nice brochure targeted at business owners; perhaps solicit input from past winners on what to include. This might be more appropriate rather than kicking off at CleanSalemGreenSalem, for example, which seems to have more homeowners than businesses attending. Additional feedback about this program should be sent to Julie via email.
Salem Recycles Facebook page: Lynn and Julie are each willing to take some responsibility. Katie was really good at framing interesting messages and will do some training for the committee. Several of us are interested in receiving training though not ready to take on the responsibility. Julie will see about holding this training in the computer room here in the City Hall Annex. She will email the committee with potential schedule for this.
New Business:
Adopt/sponsor a recycling bin: Brad has put a blue bin outside Starbucks. It was enthusiastically received and Susan has put it out for collection today. Problems were lots of straws and half-finished drinks; he had included images of what not to include but this information seems to have been overwhelmed by all the items in the bin. Much of the volume was from Starbucks. Very few items were trash, aside from the straws and some Dunkin’ Donuts Styrofoam cups. It does seem like there is an unmet wish for recycle bins and though we would like to have then blanketing the downtown, there are many restrictions and unmet issues such as who is going to clean/sort/adopt them? Penny: We may be able to tie in Green Business points for adopting a bin? Another site to try a bin might be Crosby’s; they
are supportive in the past of our education efforts and their plaza is not subject to the same restrictions as downtown. Others to help adopt: Boy scouts? We may talk more about this at a later meeting when Brad is present.
Educational sessions to teach the public: Susan wonders, would folks come to a seminar (30 mins or so) to learn how/what to properly recycle in town? We could offer refreshments; raffle blue bins among participants. Nancy: maybe link it to another event before/after—perhaps at SalemCinema Cafe, Greenland Café, or another similar place? If there were a film festival film on a related topic this would be a nice piggyback event. Could we gauge interest at the bookswap? (“Would you be interested and what would it take to get you there?”) One idea for such a presentation: “What Goes…?” i.e. what goes in the recycle bin, what goes in the trash, what goes...etc. It could be a seminar repeated as the need was assessed. Susan suggests we could make it a broader
educational piece about not only what to do with an article, but also where does it go and then what happens with it? Robin: at CleanSalemGreenSalem maybe we could schedule this a couple of times that day, off in a nearby room. Include photos of sorting facilities; have a couple of folks presenting. One problem to be tackled would be that we don’t have an intern available right now to do research on where things go. Lynn: We need to tell a story, so it is memorable. Erin: PSA’s before movies? Consensus is this is interesting and we need more thought/discussion into it.
Susan mentions an organization similar to SalemSound Coastwatch on the south shore that has a great educational program. She has seen the concept of “stations” for kids/adults to have an interaction around recycle/reduce topics. For example “how many trees to make a cardboard box” or “how long from your bin to a new piece of paper/new cereal box?” Another similar idea is “Water words that work” --communication to change folks’ behaviors: people want to feel like what they do makes a difference. Along this line, Julie notes that Salem receives $80,000/yr from the paper contract which is salaries for 1-2 full or more part-time workers. Susan and Julie will discuss ideas between our meetings.
(Surprise appearance by Mayor Driscoll who was at another meeting in the building, to find out our new website URL.)
Lynn is writing a green column for the garden club. Once the Green website is all rolled out, she will promote the website in her column, and find other other ways to weave it into the garden club programming.
RecycleAmerica Day: discussion of some type of collection that we could run: Liz—Danvers is signed up for an event; could we have an educational event? Perhaps tie in to our doorhanger idea; “what are you doing to recycle?” One idea is textile collecting, but a problem with this is reluctance to take on perceived bedbug haunts. Erin—could we collect CFL’s? (we have noticed an information error—some website says you can drop them here at City Hall Annex but per Julie this is not true.) A problem with collecting CFL’s is that they are hazardous and breakable. Lynn—could we tie in with the schools somehow? Carlton, for example. Could we collect “cloth”? asks Susan. What about an e-waste collection? This has been popular at other events we’ve done. Erin will be writing a Gazette article and hopes to highlight our AmericaRecycles Day event, whatever it may be. We don’t need to do something right on the 15th, which is a weekend. The previous weekend is Veteran’s Day and folks might be
away so the weekend after might be better. Liz—can we promote others’ events rather than creating our own? For example, reach out to NS Recycled Fibers, or the Green Businesses, or--? Maybe NSRF would give a hardhat tour of their facility for those bringing in a bag of paper to shred, for example. Marblehead is collecting Styrofoam but this is quite costly per Julie. We also don’t want to give the message that Styrofoam can be recycled because folks might put it in their bin even more than they already do. What if we could find a fiber collector who would come with a bin/truck for the day, then drive it away? Why not ask our haulers who might fit the bill? Lynn has a brochure about a company. Can we ask MassRecycles?—Julie will look. Another note concerning textile recycling: the animal shelter takes towels/sheets/rags and newspaper.
Gazette articles—Lynn has send out a schedule of who has signed up for articles but she needs the articles. They need to be written about 2 weeks of expected publish date.
Door hangers: Lynn has sample from a local business and points out that a lot of info will fit on these. With the proper wording the hanger could be a positive welcomed info piece. We could include an explanation of why, for example, Styrofoam or other items cannot be included in the curbside bom. Lynn will host a subcommittee meeting at her house to create this piece; she will send an email to committee members to get it planned.
Haunted Happenings parade—who is interested: Liz, Robin, Lynn, Jennifer, Nancy, Susan. Liz will lead a subcommittee to help organize our marchers and our display. Perhaps create a banner? What will be seen in the dark? We will need lead time if a banner is being created. Julie will also be there as before. Parade organizers have requested that all marchers wear costumes this year.
Topsfield fair—we don’t know if DEP will be participating; Julie will get us info if members want to help with their Green Pavilion.
Julie: The city is creating a mailing to people/businesses requesting permits, and we have an opportunity to create an insert for this mailing. What would we want to include? General discussion of permitting: We don’t understand why a recycling plan isn’t required to be part of events, but that will require changes by the permitting agency. However, we could put a piece together about benefits to a group of recycling at their event. Julie would like some help getting a flyer together for this. Susan and Erin, Lynn, Penny, Marcia are interested; Julie will send out an email with some times for a subcommittee to meet on this.
Solid waste contract and e-waste contract will be coming up for re-bid. We have run out of time but Julie is interested for ideas from us. We will discuss at another time.
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