 Starting this week, Portland will bring back its bulk item pickup program. Small items will be taken away for free while there will be a charge to dispose of larger ones. Arthur Nicholas spoke with Troy Moon, the city's environmental program manager, about how the new service will work. Hi, Troy. Thanks for coming in to talk about the new bulk waste program. Great. Well, thanks for having me. So the city of Portland hasn't been doing those big bulky item pickups for a while, right? That's right. The last time we did what we used to call the HIP or heavy item pickup was in 2008. So basically that program was very cumbersome for the department to do, basically took all of the department staff in public services five to six weeks to do that work. So when people were picking up the large items, they weren't fixing potholes or sidewalks or mowing things. Right. That was a large drag on the department. So tell us about the new program then. Right. The new program is going to be more specific to certain times. So rather than having to wait until a special week, you'll be able to go onto our website which is recycle.portlandmain.gov and you can basically fill out a form online and tell us what items you have that you would like to get rid of. So any bulky item, it's for bulky items only, you would be able to fill out the web form and request a service that we would provide for you most likely on your next trash day. So where do you hit the threshold of bulky item? How bulky is a bulky item? We're talking about basically things that you typically find in your home. For instance, a mattress, sofa, a big chair, and smaller items that are part of the program would be like a car seat, patio furniture, or an end table, sort of things that are commonly found in your home that are too big to fit in your bags. To fit in even one of those flex bags, the strong ones. Right. So basically if it fits in a blue city trash bag, we want you to go ahead and put it in the blue city trash bag, but if it's too big, this table for instance maybe wouldn't fit in very well on one of these chairs, that would be appropriate for the bulky item program. And so there's just one category then? No, there are actually two categories. So there's a small large item or small bulky item program and that part of the program is for free. So that would include things like these chairs or things that are 30 pounds or less that are easy to pick up, one employee could easily handle that. So when you go to the website, you'd be able to check out as part of the web form, small bulky items. And there's again no charge for those items, but you're limited to 10 per year. If you have a larger item like a couch or a mattress or a large table, there is a fee for that and that's $40. So you'd be able to pay right online and we would send you the sticker for the program in the mail that will tell you what day to put out that item. Okay, so what happens if people do put stuff out on the street? I mean, do you just leave it there? If it doesn't have a tag on it, what's going to happen to it? Well, we do have a code enforcement person. So again, we really need people to, if they're going to put out their table or their other large item, they need to have the tag. So for the large, large items, they're actually going to have a contractor who's going to go and pick those up and they will only pick up items that we specify. We're going to give them a list before the start of every day so they know that these are the items we need to pick up. So they'll set up their route and if they don't know your items out there, they won't stop because they just won't know it's there. And so if things are out inappropriately, we'll have to be getting a call from someone from our office to remind you how the program works. Okay, so this for a long time looked like a really great freebie for the citizens or tenants or people living in Portland. But there is a very large, significant cost associated with it. And so the city is trying to shed that responsibility a little bit or share it. Well, if you had an e-card, which many people have, you were able to bring 10 items to Riverside Recycling for free. So in a large sense, the fee we're assessing is it covers the cost of the transportation because the contractor has to send a truck and a couple guys and they have to go pick up the item and bring it to Riverside Recycling. So that's pretty much the service is someone coming to pick up that item and bring it to Riverside for you, as opposed to you either renting a truck or borrowing a truck and taking your time to bring it out there. Okay, so that sounds great. And there's a whole new program that's starting in a couple of weeks? Well, actually we're gonna begin taking orders on Monday, May 14th. So again, we encourage people to go to the website. It's gonna be primarily a web driven program. So again, we encourage people to visit recycle.portlandmain.gov. And there'll be instructions you can follow along, right? We hope it'll be very easy. You can find the instructions and fill out the web forms and go from there. Great, thanks very much. Thanks for coming. Great, thank you.