GBH Daily: Single-stream trash

🌬️Mostly sunny and breezy, with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 6:39 p.m.

Federal immigration agents detained at least two dozen people in New Bedford, Fall River and Dartmouth on Monday and Tuesday. One of them is Miguel Ixcuna, a father of three who works packing fruit and vegetables in Plymouth.

His partner, Antonia Lucas, told GBH’s Sarah Betancourt that she was driving with Ixcuna in the passenger seat and their two daughters, ages 3 and 9, in the back. Two cars blocked their way — one from the front and one from behind, Lucas said. Agents asked Lucas for her identification, then pulled Ixcuna out of the car.

“He was scared. They didn’t even take time to talk with him really,” Lucas said. “He said that they checked his background, that they confirmed he has no record. He said he’s worried about his daughters and me and his son.” Betancourt has more on these arrests here.

Four Things to Know

1. Gas tax talks: Gov. Maura Healey yesterday proposed suspending the state’s gas tax for two months. Her Republican opponent for the governor’s office, Mike Minogue, also suggested suspending the gas tax last week.

The state’s gas tax is 24 cents per gallon, and the average price of a gallon of regular gas stands at $4.40, according to AAA. A year ago, it stood at $3.10. House Speaker Ron Mariano said on Monday that he’d oppose suspending the gas tax, since it brings in money for state services and, since the U.S. attacked Iran in February, there’s “no end to the war in sight.”

2. MCAS blues: About 40% of students in third through eighth grades had MCAS English language arts scores that met or exceeded the state’s expectations last school year. That’s a precipitous decline from 2019, when 52% of students met or exceeded expectations.

Roughly 41% of students met or exceeded expectations in math, down from 49% in 2019. However, scores are holding steady or improving in about 69% of schools statewide. “What this does is it gives us hope that we are at the point now where we have stabilized a little bit coming out of the pandemic, understanding everything that’s happened and we really can think about acceleration,” said Rob Curtin, the state’s deputy commissioner of elementary and secondary education.

3. Clancy juror’s duties: The lawyer for Lindsay Clancy, the woman accused of killing her three children, asked the judge to investigate whether the only juror who voted to convict her used his phone during deliberations. Other members of the jury have publicly said they wanted to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jurors in Massachusetts are not allowed to use their phones during deliberations. Clancy is in a psychiatric hospital, and prosecutors in Plymouth County have not yet said whether they will take the case to trial again.

4. Riot grrrls to the front: The band Bikini Kill performed at Roadrunner in Brighton yesterday, and singer Kathleen Hanna spoke with GBH’s Morning Edition about the feminist movement and how the music landscape has changed since the 1990s.

“Back in the '90s, right before a show, I felt so alone, and I don’t feel alone. I feel like we’re all going out there together,” Hanna said. “It feels totally different. We’re older. We’ve grown up. I think we all appreciate what we had and what we have a lot more.” The full conversation is worth checking out here.

She was told they’d separate her recycling from the waste. It wasn’t true.

When management at Grace Wexler’s apartment in Malden took away the building’s recycling bins, they sent their tenants an email saying they could still dispose of their recycling. They told tenants they could toss cardboard, cans and other recyclables into the same dumpster as their garbage and that the waste would be sent to a facility that sorts recyclables from trash.

Wexler was skeptical, so she got in touch with GBH News. Reporter Craig LeMoult looked into the claim and found that the building’s contracted waste management company, Republic Services, does not offer a service that sorts trash from recyclables.

In fact, there are no companies in Massachusetts that can separate recyclables from garbage once they’re all thrown into the same trash can or dumpster.

“I mean, I’m not surprised, right? That’s what I thought,” Wexler told LeMoult. “But it sucks because someone is not being honest.”

LeMoult also found that many apartment landlords don’t offer recycling services to their tenants.

“It is absolutely not an outlier,” Abbey Massaro of the nonprofit group MassRecycle told LeMoult. “Only 43% of households in multifamily housing in Massachusetts have access to recycling.”

LeMoult never officially heard back from the company that manages Wexler’s building, CMS Partners. But over the course of his reporting the state’s Department of Environmental Protection sent the company a warning letter. And after that, Wexler said, there was something new outside her building.

“I went out to throw away my trash and there were two brand new fresh, like, clean recycling bins,” she said.

You can read LeMoult’s full investigation here. 

Dig deeper: 

-Kids have questions about jellyfish. This ‘jelly lab’ has answers.

-Massachusetts is home to just one living elephant. Activists want to send her to a sanctuary.

-Here’s how to dispose of bulky items when moving