Selectmen are considering a pay-as-you-throw program for the town’s transfer station following a recent presentation from the Department of Environmental Services.

David Degler, a solid waste program coordinator for DES, presented the proposal on Tuesday, May 6, as a way to curb transfer station costs on the budget while letting residents pay incrementally for the amount they bring to the dump.

“There’s a lot to be done and more estimates cost-wise just to get things started,” Degler said. “I was there to let them know what’s going on regionally and compared it to some of the other towns near or similar to Pelham.”

A charge of $1.50 a bag, for example, would add up to $156 a year for a household creating two bags of trash each week, Degler said. About $242 per year per household is included in the tax rate for operational costs to maintain the current waste program.

“It puts the cost back on the user,” Degler said. “The more you generate, the more you pay. The town can then cover all the cost or some of the cost. It depends on the dynamics of the town.”

Degler said about 47 communities in New Hampshire have instituted many variations of pay-as-you-throw programs that often encourage recycling as a free alternative to having to pay individually for each bag of trash.

“That’s the great thing about pay-as-you-throw,” Degler said. “There’s 47 towns and they all do it differently. There’s just a lot of flexibility with how they run the program.”

Degler said Lancaster is a good example of a community that reduced its transfer station costs to taxpayers from $178,000 to $83,000 since the town instituted a program in the 1990s.

“As costs went up for everything else, they were able to decrease it starting eight or 10 years ago,” he said.