WESTBROOK – Lynn Leavitt doesn’t go unnoticed when she walks the streets of Westbrook neighborhoods early in the morning, peering into the blue recycling bins residents put out for curbside collection.

“People do get a little curious about that,” Leavitt said. She said they wonder: “Why is someone going through my trash?”

The answer is: It’s her job.

Leavitt is the city’s first recycling coordinator. She was hired last month, and one of her key duties is making sure that the city’s new curbside recycling program is running smoothly.

That means being out on the streets in the early mornings to ensure that what is in those blue bins can actually be recycled. If Leavitt finds something that isn’t supposed to be there – like plastic bags, which jam up the machinery that sorts recycled goods – she’ll put a little orange sticker on the bin to tell residents not to include those items next time.

“It’s such a direct way to educate people,” she said. “I could put up posters around the city or we can send out flyers, but if you actually go to bring your bin in, and there’s just a little orange sticker that says, you know, no plastic bags, no Styrofoam, that’s probably going to catch your eye.”

The hiring of a recycling coordinator is the latest development in Westbrook’s automated curbside recycling program, which is almost a year old.

Oct. 5, 2009 was the first day when trucks with automated, mechanical arms started going around collecting both residential trash and household recycling, according to Arty Ledoux, deputy director of public services.

The city is planning to do something to mark the anniversary this year, but details are yet to be announced, Leavitt said.

To date, the city has issued about 12,600 toters, which are large trash bins with wheels, to city residents, Ledoux said. The green toters are for household trash, the blue ones are for recycling.

The city’s curbside trash and recycling program came about as the result of an agreement that the city forged with Casella Waste Systems.

Casella in September 2009 agreed to spend approximately $1.4 million to buy three trash trucks and the toters for the automated collection program. The agreement was part of a 20-year host community agreement Casella – which has a parcel on County Road that it wants to turn into a state-of-the-art trash processing facility – made with the city.

Brian Oliver, Northeastern regional vice president for Casella, said plans for that facility are on hold because of the economy and other factors.

But the curbside recycling program was rolled out as planned last fall, Oliver noted.

“That has been going extremely well,” he said.

The institution of the new program ended a years-long debate among city officials about the best way to implement it. Such a curbside program had been considered too expensive before.

Now, Ledoux said, the new program, which has no extra cost to residents, has more than tripled the city’s recycling rate and saved the city money in trash tipping fees.

Before the curbside recycling program, residents had to take their recyclable trash to large recycling containers located in three locations around the city. Under that system, Westbrook city’s recycling rate was 8 percent, Ledoux said.

But numbers from late last month show that 25.6 percent of the approximately 195,000 pounds of trash collected on average each week since the start of the program has been recycled instead of burned at a trash incinerator. With the tipping fee for trash currently at $62.50 per ton, the more the city recycles, the more it saves, Ledoux said.

Residents like Ann Peoples like the convenience of the curbside program.

“It saves me an enormous amount of time driving around to the various recycling bins,” said Peoples, who also is a legislator representing Westbrook in the Maine House of Representatives.

She said she also likes the fact that she doesn’t have to sort her recycling – she can just dump all the items together into the blue bin.

“I recycle so much more now because I don’t have to sort it. It just has to be clean,” Peoples said.

And she said she welcomes the orange stickers that Leavitt leaves on bins about what can’t be recycled because it helps her learn, Peoples said.

“I think it’s great,” Peoples said. “It’s a nice, non-confrontational way to gently get people to understand how to do it. We’ll call her ‘The Recycling Fairy.’”

The City Council in this year’s budget allocated $25,000 for the part-time position of recycling coordinator, Ledoux said.

Leavitt started her job on Aug. 12.

“I’m very excited about it,” Leavitt said recently.

Leavitt, 33, grew up in South Hiram, where residents gardened, composted and reused things such as plastic containers. Leavitt said it was just a natural part of living in a rural community.

“We didn’t really think about it as recycling when I was a kid,” she said.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in media studies from the University of Southern Maine and was a graphics designer before deciding to return to USM and earn another bachelor’s degree in environmental science. She graduated in 2009.

Leavitt, who has worked on recycling efforts with the city of Portland and the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said recycling is necessary because “we live in a closed system.”

When we throw things away, she said, “things might go away from your vision, but they’re not going away. They just go somewhere else, and it’s just a huge waste of resources and space.”

Ledoux, Leavitt’s boss, said the recycling coordinator job has a variety of facets: administration, quality control, enforcement and providing information and education to the public about recycling.

Walking the streets early in the morning peering into recycling bins is part of the quality control and enforcement part of her job – and the most visible thing she does.

Leavitt said she reminds residents not to leave their bins at the curbside for more than 24 hours.

“It’s an issue,” she said. “We try to keep pretty good tabs on it, particularly in winter when we’re plowing.”

Then, she said, “I also peek into bins before they’re collected and we can give people sort of preprinted stickers that say ‘Your bins weren’t positioned right so the truck couldn’t pick them up.’”

Ledoux said the blue and green bins should be a foot apart from each other and three feet away from any stationary object, such as a mailbox or a vehicle.

However, Leavitt said, “the most common thing I end up leaving a note about is that there was something that wasn’t recyclable in the bin.”

She said, “People think they can recycle clothes. I think they’re sort of assuming it’s like a Goodwill bin somehow.”

Ledoux chimed in: “We find a lot of electronics. We find a lot of what we call construction debris. Someone cuts off a 2-by-4, they chuck it in there, some sheetrock.”

Styrofoam also is not recyclable in Westbrook because the facility that processes the city’s recycled goods is not set up to take Styrofoam, Ledoux said.

But he and Leavitt said plastic bags are the most common non-recyclable item found in the bins.

Whether just loose or with items inside them that are recyclable, the bags are not acceptable, Leavitt and Ledoux said.

“Even though there’s recyclables in the trash bag, the trash bag contaminates the load,” Ledoux said.

If there are too many contaminants in a recycling load when a truck gets to the trash processing facility, the whole load can be rejected and sent to a trash incinerator, Ledoux said.

So far none of Westbrook’s loads have been rejected and the city would like to keep it that way, Ledoux said.

He said residents who are repeat violators could have their curbside recycling services suspended by the city. However, Ledoux said, such a step would be rare, and come only if the communication process failed, he said.

That’s why communication is a key component of Leavitt’s job. In addition to her curbside efforts, she also will be going into schools to educate students at all age levels about the importance of recycling.

Ledoux said, “We like the kids going home educated about recycling and being the proactive recyclers in their homes. Eventually, everybody that goes to the Westbrook schools by the time they’ve graduated will have been through some sort of recycling education program provided by this department.”

Also, he said, the department has developed a brochure about recycling, and for the first time the department is sending out an informational mailer to residents about recycling.

The city also now has a recycling website, and a dedicated recycling hotline and a recycling e-mail account, so Leavitt can answer residents’ questions.

Also, Ledoux said, Leavitt is being encouraged to “think outside the recycling box.” He said the city wants her to do such things as apply for grant money to fund additional recycling initiatives and look at the feasibility of the city’s developing its own composting program.

“We want to start thinking green for the city and growing this whole program,” Ledoux said.