INTERVIEW AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH HERMAN
Nancy Pinkin, Middlesex County Clerk, New Jersey
At the East Brunswick Recycling Center
Special place of meaning: Well when I was on town council we had a budget crisis and one of the big expenses was the cost of garbage pickup and the cost of recycling. So one way we could really reduce our expenses was by changing the garbage pickup from twice a week to once a week. And that not only saved us $600,000 in the annual contract fee, but it also reduced the wear and tear on the roads that have cost about $1,000,000 to repair one section of road in a residential area, and the pollution from the trucks, which are coming through all the time. Then we want to encourage people to invest more in recycling, rather than throwing everything into the garbage and that really worked out. One of the ways we did that, we said let’s try to make it as palatable as possible for the residents, so I thought well, we had a small recycling center if we made that a drop off station. If people had garbage and they didn’t want to keep it because residents were saying well it will be sitting around for too long, and it will be smelling and will get vermin and things like that, we don’t want to do that, well we said okay, well you can drop it off, and that will be one way that it won’t be so bad. And in the summer, we made it twice a week, so that with the heat and everything, it wouldn’t be a concern.
“There’s so many things that we can recycle and… what I want to show people is that you know you can start small and work your way up to bigger and bigger”
How she became involved/interested in politics as a woman: They say that women frequently… will step back and think that they're not qualified where men will always just jump right in so there are programs. We have a program here at Rutgers University that is called “Ready to Run” that helps people, helps women to train to both either be involved in a political campaign or to run themselves. And I was able to take advantage of that program and it is something that helps women to advance.
“People told me I can never get it done, but I did”