Swampscott’s new five-year trash and recycling contract with Republic Services starts July 1, but the Select Board still has not decided what a second trash barrel will cost, whether recycling could eventually drop to every other week, or whether the town will eventually charge a trash fee.
Residents get a scheduled chance to ask about those questions at a hybrid public Q&A on Monday, June 15 at Swampscott High School. The board is expected to take up the second-barrel fee June 17.
The biggest immediate change is the switch to automated collection. Trash and recycling will be picked up by trucks with mechanical arms that grip and tip barrels, replacing the workers who ride the back of the truck today. Each household will get a town-issued 96-gallon recycling cart, big enough to hold roughly four and a half of the old open blue bins.
Most other curbside rules stay the same at the start. Residents keep their current 35-gallon trash barrels. “The barrel that you have is the barrel we’ll be using,” Town Administrator Nick Connors told the Select Board June 3. Trash stays weekly. Recycling stays weekly. Yard waste continues for its usual seven weeks. The pay-as-you-throw blue overflow bags continue at the same price and are placed on top of the barrel.
The new requirement is spacing. Barrels need to be three feet clear of cars, poles, other barrels and other obstructions so the truck arm can reach them.
The switch from manual to automated pickup is targeted for the second week of July, giving the town time to deploy roughly 5,100 recycling carts and explain the change. Connors has also floated a costed option to delay automated recycling until as late as August 1 if the board wants more time. No such delay has been decided.
What starts in July
The vendor remains Republic Services, the company that holds the expiring contract and the hauler whose Teamsters strike disrupted pickup across 14 area communities last summer. Republic confirmed June 3 that it has secured the automated trucks, which Connors called the removal of “one lever of anxiety.” The town had negotiated a 90-day window beyond which Republic, not Swampscott, would cover the cost of any truck delay.
The recycling carts are bought, not leased. Town Meeting approved $330,000 in free cash on May 18, and the town executed the purchase the week of June 3. Connors said the 96-gallon size was chosen “to keep every option open” on future service levels and because clean recycling is cheaper for the town than trash: “We want to continue to do everything we can to stay within the 35-gallon trash and doing everything we can to recycle as much material as we can.”
The total cost of the new contract has not been publicly broken out. The expiring deal ran about $1.1 million a year plus tipping fees of $108 a ton for trash and $85 a ton for recycling, terms a board member last September called “very favorable.” Connors told Town Meeting the town is “not going to a lower price than we currently pay,” because the new contract adds recycling and fuel costs that never existed before.
The closest public proxy is the FY27 budget. Town Meeting raised the solid-waste line from $1,797,302 to $2,004,282, an increase of $206,980. Staying with manual pickup would have cost approximately $470,000 more per year, just under $40,000 a month, under every bid the town received, Connors said.
Recycling now carries a tipping fee
For the first time, Swampscott will pay a per-ton tipping fee on recycling. Connors used $125 a ton as an illustration, comparable to trash. The town also gets a new offset: 80 percent of the resale value of clean material when the handling facility sells it.
Clean recycling remains cheaper than trash. Contaminated recycling is treated as trash the town pays full freight for.
Wayne Spritz, who chaired the Solid Waste Advisory Committee, drafted the contract’s RFP, and now sits on the Select Board as the committee’s liaison, put it this way at the committee’s June 8 meeting, according to the Swampscott Tides: “For the first time, Swampscott’s never had a measurable contamination level to which we were held accountable to, but that would change.” The committee has posted no minutes of that meeting; the quote is the Tides’s reporting.
For households, the rule is direct: keep food, plastic bags and non-recyclables out of the new cart.
Decisions still pending
Every-other-week recycling. The 96-gallon cart was sized to make this possible, and the town priced the option while it had competing bidders. “We have a larger barrel to allow for that if that’s the decision that’s made, and we negotiated it because this is the moment at which we had leverage,” Connors said. If the town signed a weekly-only contract and came back in a year, he said, “now we’re stuck for four more years.”
But every-other-week recycling is a Select Board policy decision, not a contract term. No vote is scheduled, the savings figure has not been made public, and Connors said he wants any change socialized with the community first. The timeline “could be months.”
The second barrel. Households that routinely need more trash capacity will be able to buy a second barrel through the town, with a fee that covers the barrel and the tipping: roughly a quarter ton a year per barrel, by the town’s weight data. The unresolved questions are the price and whether the fee is annual or one-time.
That answer is due at the board’s June 17 meeting. Vice Chair Danielle Leonard framed the question as residents will: “People wanna know how much is the second barrel costing me a year, and do I still have to buy blue bags?”
Blue bags remain at the same cost. But with one driver and no crew on the back, only a bag or two that fits on top of the barrel gets taken.
A trash fee. The June 3 discussion also surfaced a larger question the board expects to face within the next 12 months: “whether or not we are charging for our trash,” as one speaker put it. That would be a flat fee, distinct from the per-bag overflow charge. Nothing changes on July 1, but with the town already weighing a fiscal 2029 override, a trash fee is now part of the board’s public discussion.
June 15 Q&A
The June 15 forum at Swampscott High School is a public Q&A, not a committee meeting. Connors described it as “a public information session that’s not hosted by a particular committee.” Connors will present, with DPW Director Gino Cresta and Solid Waste Advisory Committee members fielding questions.
The session is hybrid, and Connors said a third session late in June is “very likely.” The town’s FAQ page went live on the town website in early June and will expand as questions come in.
Board members have said they want to avoid a repeat of the 35-gallon barrel rollout five years ago. “There wasn’t good education,” one member recalled. Another member urged the town to communicate the whole package at once, “not drip drip drip.”
Questions still open include: What does the new contract actually cost per year? What will a second barrel cost, and is the fee annual? What would every-other-week recycling save, and when could it start? Will the recycling switch slip toward August 1, and at what cost? What contamination level is the town now accountable to, and how will households know if they’re getting it wrong? What should residents do with the old blue bins? The town has suggested keeping them for yard waste, but a formal take-back program is still undefined.
The Select Board meets June 17, with the second-barrel decision due alongside a crowded agenda.
Sources: Select Board meeting, June 3, 2026 (Z9gMTi_2KN8): trash contract update [2:31:38–2:58:15] — June 15/17 calendar and FAQ page [2:32:08–2:33:39], service levels and seven weeks yard waste [2:34:08–2:34:25], second-week-of-July target and Republic trucks/90-day window [2:35:17–2:36:17], 96-gallon cart and sizing rationale [2:36:26–2:37:33], three-foot rule and existing trash barrel [2:38:26–2:42:04], every-other-week leverage quotes [2:46:45–2:47:55], second-barrel fee and blue bags [2:52:04–2:53:08], trash-fee question (speaker not conclusively identified in the recording) [2:53:23–2:53:39], August 1 option [2:54:54], June 17 deadline [2:55:55], bags-on-top limit [2:56:45–2:57:10]. Annual Town Meeting Night 1, May 18, 2026 (RdT7wDYrSzU): manual-pickup cost [1:05:04–1:05:13], JRM/Republic history and new recycling/fuel costs [1:05:47–1:06:51], tipping fee and 80% rebate [1:08:34–1:10:54], second-barrel/take-back answers [56:45–57:16, 54:54–55:40]. September 3, 2025 Select Board (xI0vfZ7-n2M): expiring-contract terms and 2025 Republic strike. Solid Waste Advisory Committee agenda, June 8, 2026, and committee roster (data/committees/solid-waste-advisory/). Spritz contamination quote: Swampscott Tides, June 8, 2026 (press-attributed; no SWAC transcript or minutes available). Canonical names and roles from data/people/ and committee rosters. The new contract’s total annual price is not itemized in the public record. Prior coverage: 2026-05-30_solid-waste-contract.md, 2026-05-19_atm-night-1.md, 2026-05-13_fy29-override.md.