A proposal to ban the placement of Dumpsters in front or side yards of residential properties has one Cutchogue business owner seeing red.
Jon DiVello of Mattituck Environmental Services and Peconic Recycling is angry about the proposal, which will have a second public hearing tonight at Southold Town Hall.
The code amendment under consideration by the town board, which says it’s acting on residents’ complaints, would require Dumpsters to be placed only in rear yards and also to be fully enclosed by a stockade or similar fence. Properties that have a valid, open building permit are exempt from the requirements, so that containers used for construction and demolition debris may still be placed in front or side yards.
The proposal before the board would effectively eliminate the use of one-yard trash containers by residential customers, according to DiVello.
“It’s a polite way of making them illegal,” he said in an interview yesterday.
DiVello, who spoke out against the plan at an Oct. 4 public hearing on the first draft of the code change, plans to return to the podium tonight to reassert his opposition.
But his complaint with the town runs deeper than the proposed Dumpster restrictions. He believes Southold’s yellow-bag system — which requires trash to be bagged in a special plastic bag sold by the town at a premium to cover disposal costs — is a wrongheaded approach to managing solid waste. In fact, DiVello is passionate in his belief that the town should not be involved in solid waste management at all.
DiVello argues that existing law does not require the use of the town’s yellow bags for residential customers who use Dumpsters. He maintains that the code provision requiring yellow bags applies to carters who collect rubbish at the curb. Dumpster customers can simply dispose of all wastes, including recyclables, in one container, according to DiVello.
“These are a convenience for our customers,” he said.
With his company’s state-licensed recycling facility in Cutchogue, which opened in 2015, he and other carters who collect unseparated household trash can comply with state recycling laws, DiVello said.
Not so, says Supervisor Scott Russell. All non-recyclable household trash must be bagged in the town’s yellow bags, even if it’s placed in a Dumpster — and recyclables must be separated from non-recyclables for separate collection, he said.
“That was the basis of our victory when GoGreen sued us. All residential customers, Dumpsters or not, are required to use yellow bags,” Russell said yesterday.
A dispute over the yellow-bag and source-separated recycling mandates erupted between the town and GoGreen Sanitation of Riverhead, which was using Dumpsters for unseparated residential refuse collection. The town in 2012 revoked GoGreen’s carting permit and sought an injunction against the company. In a decision issued in July 2016, a State Supreme Court judge upheld Southold’s yellow bag law as “a legal, constitutional and valid exercise of the police and legislative powers” of the town. The law encourages recycling and reduces the amount of solid waste that must ultimately be disposed, fulfilling mandates imposed by the state.
Russell added that the town has issued summonses to Mattituck Environmental for noncompliance with the yellow-bag law.
“They should leave it to the private sector,” DiVello said. “We can do it more efficiently and effectively.”
DiVello argues that the town’s yellow-bag system and the transfer station it operates in Cutchogue is a money-losing proposition.
“Every piece of garbage that goes into that place costs them money,” DiVello said.
The town’s transfer station accepts wastes — which can be self-hauled or picked up by a private carting company. The town contracts with a trash-hauling company for disposal. Non-recyclable wastes are currently being disposed at the Covanta incinerator in Babylon. Comingled recyclables are brought to the transfer station separately and they are shipped out to a recycling facility, where they are further separated and shipped to market.
The town supervisor said all shipping costs out of the transfer station are “self-funded” with user fees — bag sales, scale fees and the like. “We make money on recyclable material sales,” Russell said. “Our operating costs exceed our income because labor and management are a cost of doing business.”
Russell noted that the town provides additional services at its transfer station: disposal of construction debris, metals and used oil. The town also maintains a composting operation at the site.
DiVello’s business partner is Stanley Lomangino, who, like DiVello, grew up in a family that operated trash hauling and recycling businesses for decades. Lomangino’s father, Anthony, was a co-founder and co-owner of a large waste management and recycling business in south Florida, which was sold in 2016 to the publicly traded, Houston-based Waste Management for $525 million, according to documents filed with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.
DiVello’s late grandfather, John M. DiVello founded East End Ecology/Mattituck Sanitation in 1971.
Today, DiVello runs the waste hauling and recycling business out of a nearly 35,000-square-foot building in an industrial park off Depot Lane in Cutchogue. The cavernous facility processes up to 300 tons per day of solid waste and construction/demolition debris. The wastes are brought in by haulers — carters from Shelter Island, Southold and Riverhead use the facility — and sorted by a series of noisy, tumbling drums and vibrating conveyor belts and a small cadre of line workers — about a dozen in all — who physically pick out recyclable materials and toss them into bins.
In this way, the company separates out everything it can sell at various materials markets — almost all of them overseas: paper, cardboard, plastics, metals. Wood is sold to a company in Connecticut, where it’s burned for energy. The residue — 20 to 40 percent of what’s taken in, depending on whether the raw material is construction and demolition debris or household rubbish, DiVello said — is baled and shipped to landfills in Ohio or Pennsylvania.
The proposed new Dumpster rules, which will make their use impractical at most homes, would eliminate about 200 of Mattituck customers, DiVello said, resulting in a loss of about $10,000 a month in revenue.
That’s not a catastrophic loss for his business, DiVello said, but, he argues, it makes no sense for residents, taxpayers or the environment.
“Maybe the yellow bag made sense 30 years ago, I don’t know,” DiVello said, “but it doesn’t make sense today.” With the availability of a sorting facility like his Cutchogue recycling center, it’s more cost-effective to separate recyclable materials there.
The yellow bag system doesn’t work for weekenders and short-term renters, according to DiVello.
“Sunday night comes and they don’t know what to do with the trash,” DiVello said. “So they put it in someone else’s Dumpster or in a town trash can at the beach or they dump it on the side of the road on their way back west,” he said.
