All Around Pennsauken

By Joe Scavuzzo, Director, Department of Public Works

Before I get to the main topic of this article, I’d like to welcome Luis Green and Greg Hannah to the Public Works team. Both residents of Pennsauken come to us with landscaping and handyman experience, as well as a lot of energy, adding pieces to the puzzle that is the future of our department. Lou and Greg began back in early June and have blended into our operations so seamlessly, I forgot to mention them in the July and August editions of this article! They are quickly becoming assets to our organization and I look forward to continue working with them.

For those of you who have followed my exciting coverage on recycling the past few months, hold on to your seats! According to a letter from our recycling center, FCR Camden, LLC, any Pennsauken recycling trucks with over 8 percent contamination will be rejected. Contamination is when residents place non-recyclables in the recycling such as pizza boxes, plastic bags, Styrofoam, bubble wrap, frozen food containers, plastic/paper to-go containers, cups, straws or utensils and even hoses or hangers. These items should always go in the trash. Remember: When in doubt, throw it out!

So what happens when one of our trucks has more than 8 percent contamination in its recyclables? According to the letter, Pennsauken will have to dispatch trucks to pick up the material and remove it from their facility within two hours. This will be a huge burden on Public Works operations and add significant cost to our disposal budget – even if 91 percent of that truck contains good recyclables! As I write this on Aug. 9, we have received two rejection notices: one truck from Monday’s route and one from Tuesday’s route. Although this applies to all Camden County municipalities, we need to evaluate and identify potential rejected load sources in Pennsauken.

Unfortunately, a one-week, heads-up letter was not enough time for an entire town to be evaluated, educated, and fixed before the effective date. It is also unrealistic for Public Works to look in each recycling bucket every single day. So to start, we will learn from the rejected recycling trucks, identifying which particular area of that collection day’s route was over the 8 percent allowance. This will get us some rough data, but it’s a starting point.

The two daily recycling trucks empty their load once a day at the recycling facility, so coordination with our waste collection contractor, South Jersey Sanitation, will be critical to know what rejected load came from which area. This can be determined by using their truck’s GPS system to see where the truck was in Pennsauken when it collected the contaminated recycling. This will not affect their daily collection.

Pennsauken residents produce a generally clean recycling stream. We have been informed on three or four occasions over the past year of a potential to reject. This makes the whole process easier for all parties and allows us to “clean up” just a few spots and educate across the board.

So after the areas with rejected loads are known, how can Pennsauken residents help prevent contaminated recycling from being collected? The recycling facility tells us which trucks are rejected. We take that truck’s GPS and see what streets that recycle load came from. We will direct Pennsauken’s Sanitation Inspector to this area on that street’s next collection day to seek out any obvious contaminations. He will place a red “DO NOT COLLECT” tag on the recycling buckets with noticeable contamination and leave a friendly form letter posted on the front door that would indicate what the issue is, how to correct it, and have a colored informational flyer attached. The correction 100 percent of the time will be to take the garbage item(s) out of the recycling and toss in the trash. On the following recycling collection day, the resident will place the recycle bucket at the curb and it will be collected. At this point, we believe the resident will know how to avoid this in the future and the recycling will get cleaner.

As of Aug. 9, the only data we have to work with is the week of Aug. 5. On Monday and Tuesday, one of the two trucks on both days was rejected. Thursday and Friday had no rejection notices, so we presume contamination was under 8 percent. Monday’s contamination was 17 percent; Tuesday’s was 32 percent. Since our limit is 8 percent contamination, our immediate goal is to get those routes below that mark and everything gets easier. Of course, our ultimate goal is zero contamination, but that will take some time. If we look at the percentages and apply that to the amount of households on those two days, we’re only looking at 450 contaminated buckets to leave curbside out of approximately 5,500. We will still tag on Thursdays and Fridays to educate and continue lowering our overall contamination. Realistically, we anticipate this method to have an immediate effect and likely resolve the problem within a month or two.   

Department Of Public Works Office Schedule

Our office hours are currently from 7:00 a.m.-2:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. To contact the Department of Public Works, call (856) 663-0178 or e-mail publicworks@twp.pennsauken.nj.us.