Reducing Our Waste
How Does Danvers Stack Up?
Homes, businesses, and Town facilities produce trash every day. This waste is picked up curbside and taken to the Covanta Materials Recovery Facility where it is burned to generate energy. All of that daily waste really adds up: we produce around 41,365 tons of residential and commercial waste per year, which contributes 10% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. Though the majority of our waste comes from commercial facilities, reducing residential waste is essential.
Massachusetts has a plan to shrink the amount of waste we generate (90% by 2050!), and you can support that effort by reducing your use of single-use items, reusing and repurposing materials, and recycling right. Check out these resources to help you minimize waste!
Reducing Our Waste
First, Reduce and Reuse
How can we manage our waste in a more sustainable way? The first thing we can do is tackle waste at the source by buying only what we need and reusing materials instead of throwing them into the trash. Next, recycling and recovering materials allows resources to continue to be useful. Taking organic material like food scraps out of our waste stream will be an important, too!
One way Danvers has aligned with the Waste Management Hierarchy is by implementing a Plastic Bag Reduction Bylaw. This policy bans the use of single-use plastic bags, such as thin grocery bags, which cannot be recycled through residential recycling programs and lose most of their value after just one use.
Sustainable Waste Management
Increase Recycling, Decrease Contamination
Recycling is another tool that we can use to divert our waste from incineration. In Danvers, recycling is "dual stream," or collected in two buckets: one for glass plastic, and metal, and the other for paper. Recycling is required and unlimited for households eligible for curbside pickup. Out of all the households who have municipal waste collection, less than a third of waste is being recycled. We have room to improve and all Danvers residents can take action to increase our diversion rate. Beginning in 2019 the Town introduced a Recycling Sticker Rejection Program to decrease the amount of contamination in our waste stream by educating residents on what items they've 'wishcycled'. By reducing contamination we can make our recycling stream a cleaner product and can get more of our curbside recycling made into new products. That's a win for our environment and our economy!
Use this FAQ to find out how to correctly sort your waste and avoid contaminating your recycling bin with materials that cannot be recycled.
Sustainable Waste Management
Special Collections
Danvers offers options for easily disposing of items that can contaminate recycling bins. Residents have access to curbside pickup for recycling, yard waste, Styrofoam, textiles, and bulky items. These special collections can have a big impact on reducing recycling contamination - in the year 2022 alone the textile program recycled almost 30,000 pounds of old clothing! The Town also holds events like Zero Waste Recycling Weekends and Household Hazardous Waste Day to encourage proper disposal of common items.
Check out the Town's waste events schedule and plan to attend a drop-off event!
Be Part of the Solution
Help Our Community Reduce Waste!
Reduce your waste and help Danvers use resources more wisely.
Community Clean-Up Event