Auburn University Receives DEM Recycling Grant

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management recently award the Waste Reduction & Recycling Department of Auburn University’s an eighty five thousand dollar grant to improve recycling services on the college campus.

The funds will be used to purchase recycling bins and equipment to increase the convenience of recycling for the entire university community. The funds will also be used to improve outreach efforts to encourage participation from students, staff, and faculty in local recycling programs. The University first began their campus-wide recycling program in 2005 and has continually looked for ways to enhance and expand the reach of their services.

The grant funds are made available through Alabama’s Solid Wastes and Recyclable Materials Management Act which places a one dollar per ton fee for all waste materials disposed of in state landfills. To date, over one million dollars from the fees collected has been awarded to community groups and organizations looking to reduce waste and improve recycling in the state of Alabama. Auburn University has received close to a quarter of a million dollars from the fund since 2009.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: If you live in a state that places a fee on landfill dumping, looking into recycling and waste reduction grants might just help your municipal government or local non-profit organization. A special program grant can help to start a new recycling program or energize an existing one. There’s no guarantee that a grant application will be funded, you’ll never know what’s possible if you don’t try!

 

Ohio Launches Restaurant Recycling Program

The capital city of Columbus, Ohio, is preparing to launch an innovative new recycling program targeting to the city’s restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and eateries. With an aim of increasing the recycling rate of glass bottles, the city hopes to better include these types of businesses in a new glass recycling program that is expected to debut in the city’s popular High Street area by the end of summer.

Calling the program Recycling on High, the business focused waste glass recycling program hope to save the city and businesses money in waste disposal and landfill fees by better capturing the one hundred and fifty tons of glass bottle that are generated each week in the High Street area.

Special recycling bins of various sizes will be provided to restaurants and the glass recyclables will be collected by the city three times each week. The collected glass will be re-used by manufacturers throughout the state and region to make new products such as food containers and insulation.

The program will run for one calendar year, and if deemed success will be extended beyond the High Street area into other neighborhoods through the city.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: What is your city or town doing to involve local businesses with recycling? As the Columbus glass recycling program shows, helping business to reduce waste can also provide other businesses with valuable materials needed for manufacturing new products. Everyone saves when recycling improves!

Increasing Apartment Building Recycling

Cities wanting to develop effective waste recycling practices for large apartment buildings face a set of challenges different from regular residential or commercial waste management.

Multi-family dwellings are typically defined as a residential building with four or more units. Often, these buildings have limited space to store recyclables making it difficult for those who live there to participate. Some large, older buildings may have hallway chutes for trash disposal, but not recycling – leaving residents to move bins on their own.

In Culver City, California the city received a special grant from CalRecycle, the state’s recycling department, to start a recycling program for apartment buildings in 2011. Residents were encouraged to speak with their property managers to offer recycling services which proved to be the most effective way to get building owners to participate.

To deal with space issues, the city utilized a “scooter” truck to accompany the larger collection truck for those apartment parking garages that were underground and low-ceilinged. The scooter truck, which is frequently used for commercial and industrial trash collection was able to successfully reach recycling areas that a large truck would not.

In the first year the city had participation from twenty eight multi-family buildings and as a result, waste disposal decreased significantly from each participating building and very close to the average rates seen in single family neighborhoods throughout the city.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: If you’re a building owner or property manager, what kind of recycling services do you offer your tenants? You might find that you’ll be able to save money on your garbage disposal fees by recycling more!

Colorado Considers Bag Fees For Retailers

The city of Durango in Colorado is joining the ranks of municipalities throughout the United States looking to curb litter and reduce waste disposal by considering a plastic ban ban. The City Council of Durango is moving incrementally toward the ban by first implementing a ten-cent fee for use of disposable plastic and paper bags.

The fee would apply only to large retail and grocery stores and the cost of implementation will be split between businesses and city government. The city is now beginning a comprehensive outreach campaign to inform all residents, consumers and businesses of the importance of using re-usable shopping bags and the environmental impact that single use plastic bags have on wildlife, the environment, and landfills throughout the state..

Some residents have expresses concern about the fees but Durango Mayor Dick White is standing strong on the fact that the elected officials need to do what is best for the long-terms health and well-being of the community. The final vote on the measure will take place later this summer, and if it passes the fee for plastic bags would being in early March of 2014.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Most people do not embrace change readily, but plastic bag bans are going to increase in popularity as time moves forward. If your business relies on plastic bags, start thinking of alternatives now – don’t wait. If you can be two steps ahead, you’ll already be prepared – and while your competition is trying to fight city hall, you’ll be taking their customers by showing how “green friendly” you are!

College Moves To Reusable Containers

In Ohio, Ashland University will join a popular movement on college campuses throughout the country by implementing the use of reusable takeout containers in their dining halls and commissaries.

The way the reusable containers work is similar to a re-usable water container. Students purchase a polypropylene food container for a few dollars and then bring it with them when purchasing food to-go, such as pizza, salads, sandwiches, or pasta. After eating, students simply rinse out the containers and place then in specially designed collection receptacles on campus.

The reusable containers are then washed and sanitized and placed back into circulation. Students simply pick up another container the next time they buy take-out food.

In addition to students, college faculty and staff are also being encouraged to participate.

Interest in programs like this are growing in interest outside of colleges as well. In Portland, Oregon, several food trucks that service the downtown area have started offering customers the reusable containers as well.

One of the benefits of the reusable containers are that they are dishwasher safe and can be placed in microwaves. Made of break-resistant, recyclable PP and can safely be used up to seven hundred times.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: The reusable products market is always changing. New products are developed and products that were formerly expensive, begin to drop in price. It pays to stay in the know about the relevant choices in your industry – what may have been cost prohibitive in pasty years may be cost effective now!

E-Waste Laws Boost Recycling

A recent research review conducted in New York State by the Product Stewardship Institute has shown that for residents and businesses, having easy access to computer and electronics recycling contributed to an increase in recycling of unusable and outdated equipment and a decrease in municipal spending.

The state’s electronic producer responsibility law went into effect in the spring of 2011 and in the first eight months of operations, e-waste recycling increased over seventy five percent for a total of forty four million pounds of scrap electronics. The law was designed to prevent hazardous materials found in e-waste from ending up in landfills and to shift the responsibility of collecting these materials from local governments back to the electronics producers and manufacturers.

As a result, New York’s e-waste recycling is a growing sector, creating employment opportunities and adding to the tax base. Municipalities are experiencing cost savings by accessing e-waste recycling through the required manufacturer programs instead of paying to collect and dispose of the materials.

However, there is still room for improvement. The report states that public awareness for take-back recycling program is still low and that more, convenient collection sites throughout the state would help to increase the recycling rate even more.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Whether you’re looking to increase recycling in a state, town, or your small business, the important thing to remember is convenience. The easier and simpler it is for people to recycle, the easier it’ll be to encounter success!

California Increases Plastics Recycling

Berkeley, California presidents will soon be able to recycle more varieties of plastic containers as part of the city’s curbside recycling service. Ecology Center, a not-for-profit group that has overseen Berkeley’s recycling program since the mid-1970s, will now accept clean dairy tubs, plastic cups, food storage containers, and plastic trays. Prior to the change, residents were only allowed to recycle milk jugs and plastic bottles.

The reason for the delay in accepting additional forms of  plastics was difficulty with establishing a viable market for recycling them. Ecology Center and city officials did not want to collect materials under the guise of recycling only to have them incinerated or landfilled when a recycler or manufacturer requiring those plastics could not be found.

The city presently is not accepting items such as Styrofoam, thin film plastic, compostable plastics, and plastic utensils including coffee lids. However, should a business enterprise be willing to work with the city to acquire those items, there is the possibility that the collection list could change.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Recycling your waste materials is a great idea, but you want to make sure the items you’re collecting have a value and market demand. Take time to research the opportunities that are available and plan your recycling programs accordingly for maximum benefit to the environment and your bottom line!

Hockey Fans Embrace Food Recycling

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently announced that all thirty National Hockey League (NHL) professional teams across the United States and Canada are now collaborating with the “Rock and Wrap It Up” program to collect and provide leftover food to emergency homeless shelters and food pantries.  The Rock and Wrap It Up (RWU) program is part of the EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge.

RWU started back in 1991 and is credited with recycling over one hundred million pounds of unwanted food and providing food to more than two hundred million people. The RWU program collects uneaten food and leftovers from hotels, concerts, sporting events, corporate meetings, school cafeterias, and political rallies, and distributes them to over forty thousand participating food pantries and shelters. RWU relies on local volunteers to collect and box leftover waste from the games – with the incentive of receiving a tour of the hosting team’s locker room and main office – and then deliver to the designated charities.

The EPA estimates that food waste is responsible for almost fifteen percent of all municipal solid waste and almost all of it is disposed of in landfills or incinerators. With fifteen percent of all US households being at risk for experiencing hunger, programs like RWU and the Food Recovery Challenge are looking for new and innovative ways to feed people instead of landfills.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Are you paying money every month to dispose of your company’s or building’s food waste? Take a good look at the food that being thrown into the garbage bin – is there perfectly good, uneaten food that could be donated to a food pantry? Are there scraps that could be used for animal feed? Could landscaping waste be composted? Going “green” with your organic waste can help you save “green” every month!

 

Food Waste Bans Coming to New England

The New England state of Massachusetts is looking to have all restaurant patrons and owners have a “clean plate” when it comes to food scraps. The Energy and Environmental Affairs office for the state is looking to turn unwanted food into clean energy by enacting a ban on food waste disposal for commercial enterprises such as restaurants.

The plan, which is still in the preliminary stages, would require any business that generates a minimum of one ton of organic food waste per week to repurpose or donate the food. If approved, the plan would begin July 1, 2014. Most smaller, independent businesses would not meet the minimum threshold, but large restaurants, colleges, universities, large schools, hospitals, hotels and large office buildings with internal cafeterias would.

The plan would have collected food waste shipped to an anaerobic digestion facility for conversion into a biogas used in the creation of electricity and heat. Food scraps could also be shipped to a composting or animal-feed facility. The state is currently offering three million dollars in low-interest loans to private waste and recycling companies looking to develop their operations to include energy from organic waste production.

Organic food waste makes up close to twenty five percent of the waste stream being disposed of in landfills and incinerators. If enacted, the ban would help the state reach its goal of reducing the waste stream by thirty percent by 2020.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Food and organic waste has plenty of value – either as community donations, composting, animal feed, or as an energy source. If you’re still paying to dispose of your food waste, it’s time to look into solutions that could possibly save you money. By going green with food waste, you might save “green” every year!

 

 

For more information about AD, go to MassDEP’s website.

Illinois Offers One-Stop Recycling

The Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, will soon be offering their residents a new and improved waste recycling and hazardous materials collection center.  The new facility is designed to provide “one stop” recycling services where individuals, households, and businesses can bring anything that is recyclable including items such as batteries, light bulbs, e-waste, medical items, and traditional materials such as plastic, glass, and paper.

Naperville receive a close to nine hundred thousand dollars from the state to assist in funding the new project. The city will contribute close to three hundred thousand dollars toward the cost.

The city’s current recycling facilities were responsible for collecting and processing more than fifteen tons of traditional recyclable items, over fifty thousand gallons of recyclable liquids and nearly three hundred tons of other items considered recyclable. However, the demand for increased levels of recycling are beyond the facility’s capability, thus the reason for seeking funding for upgrades and enhancements.

The facility will be used not only by Naperville, but surrounding communities as well and is expected to impact the recycling rate of the entire county area.

WasteCare Wants You to Remember: Providing a “one stop” center where a wide variety of items can be recycled and safely disposed of can certainly help to boost a community’s recycling rate and provide businesses the opportunity to lower their trash disposal fees by recycling more items.