PRINCETON: Curbside pickup for town’s trash

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   The consolidated Princeton will provide residential trash pickup at the curbside starting the first week of January, officials said Monday.
   This will be a change for current Princeton Township residents, who pay a private hauler for back-door pickup. Princeton Borough already collects trash as a municipal service.
   Mayor-elect Liz Lempert said Monday that collection schedules and other details still have to be worked out. Once officials get that information, they intend to notify residents through the mail in the middle of December.
   In the meantime, she advised township residents to contact their private hauler and cancel the service by the end of the year. Haulers must get a written cancellation notice seven days before customers switch.
   She expects most residents will use the municipal collection, although some might want to keep a private hauler. One oft-cited reason is that residents with long driveways don’t want to go to the trouble of lugging their trash to the curb. Another is that residents would want to keep twice-weekly collection as opposed to once a week.
   Backdoor collection “may” be available in February, although at an “additional cost once a municipal collection contract is awarded,” read a notice posted on the township web site.
   Officials still are waiting to get bids back from haulers interested in getting the expected two-year contract to collect trash from the combined 7,100 households in the merged Princeton. A firm is expected to be hired early next month, and begin working in February.
   For January 2013, Princeton will use Central Jersey Waste & Recycling Inc., the trash hauler the borough has been using.
   Municipal trash collection will be once a week at the curb, said Councilwoman-elect Jo S. Butler. Residents of apartments, condos and townhouses will not be eligible for curbside pickup if they have trash bin service. But the municipality will reimburse condo and townhouse associations for what it would have normally cost the municipality to pick up curbside trash, municipal engineer Robert V. Kiser said Tuesday.
   Ms. Lempert said she would expect Mercer County to continue handling recycling collection as it does already for the township and the borough. Mr. Kiser said there will “no changes to recycling at all.”
   Residents will have the option of participating in a food composting program starting in February. The environmentally friendly concept is designed to reduce the amount of waste that goes into landfills. Officials have talked about limiting that program to 1,000 residences and charging a modest registration fee, anywhere from $3 to $5 a month.
   At the moment, the two towns offer composting but participation has been low, to around 640 residences combined. Residents are charged a $20 monthly fee to participate.