$359k…With Perks

I wanted to take a blog post to commend the City Engineers office of Beverly. One of the best things about living in Taxachusetts is – no, I wasn’t going to say “excise tax,” but thanks for playing – the quantity of programs available from state and local governments to encourage Green culture in the Bay State. These folks are always looking for a way to scrape some money together to lower costs later – and to help residents do the right thing.

Our City Engineers are all over this stuff. We’ve had curbside recycling for ages, of course, with big blue bins available at city hall for $5. Now, we’re going to get big blue locking-lid bins to encourage paper recycling and keep that paper dry – Home Despot has them for like $80, but they’ll be about half that for city residents. The composters are awesome, and the rain-water collection barrels available through city programs are a little overpriced but still way below retail. We’re down to about 1 cubic foot of actual garbage per week in our household, thank you very much.

We get free compost from our Agricultural Recycling center (the Stump Dump), although after a whole winter of fermentation there was none available to THIS city resident last weekend (harrumph). As JRM charges a $50 minimum for dumping at the transfer station in Salem, having a place to dump brush and yard waste is a godsend for someone heating with wood.

Click here to view State Tax incentives for renewable energy.

Click here for federal tax incentives.

Here is a link to a page that describes qualifying Alt-energy investments. My wood stove doesn’t count — but now I want to make a wood-fired steam engine….

Remember that if you were to install a solar panel or windmill, these incentives are on top of all the free electricity you’d create for yourself!

Image links to source; this was apparently a North Carolina school’s attempt to encourage paper recycling.  They hadn’t appeared to gave given him a name.