Patrick Administration Awards $20,000 Grant to
Help Bolster Paper Recycling Campaign

The Patrick Administration today announced the award of a $20,000 grant for the Mass Recycles Paper Campaign, a statewide public awareness initiative to increase paper recycling at homes, schools and businesses. 

Awarded by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), the grant will be used to broaden the reach of the statewide paper recycling campaign, a partnership among MassDEP, MassRecycle Inc., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and dozens of recycling and waste management companies.

"Last year in Massachusetts, 1.5 million tons of paper, which could have been recycled, was instead sent to incinerators or landfills and it's costing us millions in disposal fees," said MassDEP Commissioner Laurie Burt. "Over the years, advances in paper recycling have made it easy to recycle cardboard and most paper products. In order to meet our goal of reducing the waste stream, we all need to do our part to put paper into our recycling bins instead of in our trash bins."  

The goal of the Mass Recycles Paper Campaign is to divert or recycle at least one million tons of the paper that currently gets buried or burned each year in Massachusetts. MassDEP estimates that 1.5 million tons of paper is wasted by Massachusetts residents, businesses, and government agencies that send the waste to landfills or incinerators.
MassDEP estimates that processing the waste costs as much as $100 million in disposal fees every year. 

Paper that is not recycled represents a cost to municipalities because trash disposal is costly in Massachusetts. On average, the cost of trash that is collected and taken to landfills or incinerators is $70 per ton.  

Commissioner Burt urges residents to help reduce the costs of disposal by reducing the amount of waste by recycling more paper. Currently, 320 of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts operate residential recycling programs. The more paper those programs receive, the more money the municipality saves. MassDEP estimates that last year it cost  Massachusetts cities and towns more than $50 million to dispose of paper that could have been recycled.

"Recycling one million more tons of paper each year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 928,000 metric tons of carbon equivalents, or over 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide," said Commissioner Burt.

MassRecycle is asking municipalities, civic organizations, businesses, schools and citizens all over the state to join its campaign to recycle more paper and save a million tons of paper from going to waste.

MassRecycle worked with MassDEP to create "A Grassroots Guide to Recycling More Paper."  MassRecycle is distributing this guide free to each member community to help them run a local paper campaign. Companion promotional materials (advertisements, flyers, posters and billing inserts) can be downloaded at the website www.massrecyclespaper.org/toolkit.html#templates. The material is free to partner municipalities and non-profit organizations wishing to reproduce and distribute them.

Interested municipalities and organizations are asked to pass a resolution, to show commitment to this campaign from their top elected leadership. Currently, 171 communities have signed the resolution - with mayors, city councilors and selectmen from across the Commonwealth - all joining in support of the Mass Recycles Paper Campaign. For more information about the Mass Recycles Paper Campaign, visit www.massrecyclespaper.org .

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