AUBURN — The city could swap the twice-monthly curbside recycling program with weekly automated collections using heavy-duty covered carts by July 2014, representatives from Pine Tree Waste told city councilors Monday.

City Manager Clinton Deschene said councilors are considering ways to trim the budget, and one suggestion is to do away with the city’s current curbside recycling program. He invited Pine Tree Waste officials Stu Axelrod and Karen McNaughton to discuss what would be involved in a Pine Tree Waste-led program.

“Traditional waste is going away,” Axelrod said. “The material is going elsewhere. It’s getting parsed out into recycling, organics or other things.”

Lewiston inked a deal in January with Pine Tree Waste’s parent company, Casella Solid Waste, letting the company build an automated single-stream recycling facility south of the town’s landfill on River Road.

The 15,000-square-foot automated recycling center on River Road would be built this summer.

“What eats up dollars is transportation costs,” Axelrod said. “The minute you have a local processing plant, the economics just change.”

Axelrod said the company is now promoting a two-bin trash collection system. The company would provide two heavy, lidded wheel carts — one for recycling and another for traditional household solid waste.

A single automated truck would stop at each address, and an electronic arm would pick up each cart and empty it. An RFID computer chip embedded in the electronic arm would track how much waste residents dump.

“The savings are driven by labor savings,” he said. “You have a much safer work environment. You don’t have people lugging cans around.”

McNaughton said the company had not made a formal bid to the city, but could do so if that’s what councilors want.

Deschene said it was pretty clear that the city staff thinks it’s worth considering.

“There are a variety of financial consequences for continuing with the current system,” Deschene said. “I asked them to give us a few options that we could do so we don’t have to purchase the recycling trucks and adopt a system that is sustainable in the long term.”

Deschene recommended that councilors begin phasing out the current system and develop a full system with Pine Tree that would begin in July 2014.

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