I'm Ellen Smith, member of the Oak Ridge City Council. Thank you for visiting my blog and reading my views on public and private life in and around Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This website is my own; content here does not represent the official policies or views of the City of Oak Ridge. To add your own comments, click on the topic title to open a comment box. To read posts about a particular topic, scroll down to "Categories" (in the sidebar) or use the "Search" box in the sidebar. Look under "Archives" to see collections of past posts organized by date.
By most measures, Saturday’s forum “Greening Oak Ridge: A Community Forum for Shaping a Green Future” was a smashing success. There were about 100 people there, with a diverse variety of perspectives, and those people seemed to be thoroughly engaged in generating ideas about what Oak Ridge needs to do to make Oak Ridge [...]
The City’s plans for a comprehensive “visioning” process got shelved, but thanks to the Environmental Quality Advisory Board “greening the city” effort, the community is soon getting a chance to engage in the kind of discussion that I was hoping that the visioning process would provide — and at next to no cost to the [...]
This week’s Newsweek magazine has an article about RecycleBank. In Everett, Massachusetts, the article says the program has resulted in a 10x increase in recycling. It quotes the mayor as saying, “The recycling buzz is out there; it’s fun filling that thing up to the top.”
As described in the article, the company’s current push to [...]
At Monday evening’s work session on recycling, the full Council heard about plans to start single-stream recycling on October 1, 2008. Yes, Virginia, we can put all of our recyclables at curbside starting October 1: not just alumninum and steel cans, #1 and #2 plastic bottles, glass bottles, and newspaper, but also mixed paper (office [...]
Last week the local papers had some positive news regarding the Oak Ridge mall property: the prospective developers are doing test drilling for a “geothermal” HVAC system on the site.
Of course, a “green” HVAC system is not much use at a shopping center unless the center has some commercial tenants to use the conditioned space, [...]
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 [...]