Recycling in Oak Ridge is about to get a lot better
There’s great news for Oak Ridgers who have been wishing for our curbside recycling collection to include mixed paper recycling and all types of recyclable plastic. Starting October 1, we’ll have “single stream recycling.” That means that all forms of recyclables will be collected at curbside, loaded into the truck, and hauled off to the Advanced Polymer Recycling (APR) facility in Knoxville to be sorted and shipped to end users. They’ll take all kinds of paper, glass bottles, aluminum cans, steel cans, and plastic numbers 1-7 (including plastic bags, but not styrofoam — although even styrofoam might be added in the future), and APR assures us that the collected material will be recycled (not sent to a landfill).
Our Environmental Quality Advisory Board (EQAB) had a presentation on August 7* (I was there) where personnel from Waste Connections (the city’s waste hauler) and APR told about the new recycling program.
EQAB also heard about the Recycle Bank program that could significantly increase our recycling participation by giving people incentives to recycle. For a fee of about $2 per month per household, residents would be provided with a 65-gallon wheeled collection cart outfitted with an RFID tag. The cart would hold far more material than we can put in the 18-gallon bins we have now, and when bins are picked up at curbside the household’s recycling “contributions” would be automatically weighed and recorded. Households would be credited with points based on the weight of the material they recycled, and points could be used to obtain discount coupons and other valuable benefits contributed by the Recycle Bank’s local and national business sponsors. According to the Recycle Bank personnel who spoke to EQAB, the typical household generates enough recyclable material to earn $20 worth of rebates each month, which they describe as a 10-to-1 return for the $2 fee.
The Recycle Bank program has been operating in the northeast — mostly in the Philadelphia area — for a couple of years, and they are now branching out to other regions. Based on experience in other cities, Waste Connections and the Recycle Bank figure that Oak Ridge would go from 45% participation in curbside recycling to 80-85% participation, and we’d increase our recycling from 10% of the solid waste stream to about 33%. That’s a 25% reduction in waste sent to the landfill and a substantial benefit to the environment, saving landfill space, saving trees that would be processed into paper, saving some energy and water that would be used in producing commodities from virgin material, and reducing emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases from mining, logging, and processing. It also reduces costs for waste hauling and landfill fees, but because (1) the city has a collection contract with Waste Connections and (2) Anderson County pays tipping fees at the landfill (for waste collected in the Anderson County part of Oak Ridge), it’s not clear to me how much of that savings the city government would see.
City Council is scheduled to hear about these new recycling opportunities at a work session on September 8, and I expect that on September 22 we will have a vote on joining the Recycle Bank program. There are a few wrinkles to be worked out (for example, not all Oak Ridge households have a sidewalk or driveway on which they could roll a heavy wheeled container to the street), but it looks to me like this is something that Oak Ridgers will embrace.
—–
*There was a similar presentation in Knoxville on August 13 for area governments, reported by the News Sentinel the following day. That article made it sound like Knoxville is the only community considering these changes, but that’s not the case. According to Waste Connections, Oak Ridge accounts for about half of their curbside recycling customers in all of East Tennessee. They figure that if the Recycle Bank program is going to happen anywhere in the region, Oak Ridge will have it first.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
As I expressed last night in council, I would like the city to become serious about this effort. The fact that retail is subjected into this effort scares me. If it is so important to provide money back to the recyclers, our city should be able to redeem these coupons for our city electric water and the 5 dollars waste payment made every month.
If it has retail attached to it, it could fail under James O’Connor’s term.
Comment by Ray Kircher — August 19, 2008 @ 6:06 am
[...] that he expected to present a proposal for a contract for the Recycle Bank incentive program (see this earlier blog post) at the October 18 City Council meeting (not September 22 as projected earlier). After 3 weeks of [...]
Pingback by Ellen Smith for Oak Ridge » Recycling incentives to be considered in October — September 10, 2008 @ 11:18 pm
SEO ZONE is a search engine optimization(seo) firm, provides seo, seo article, seo tools,seo news and seo related informations,helping companies leverage the internet to increase revenues and profits.
Comment by RIsEoben — December 5, 2008 @ 1:09 am