COMMENTARY

We Can Do Better than Single Stream Recycling

LET YOUR MAYOR, CITY COUNCIL, OTHER OFFICIALS KNOW WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT PROCESS

Most parents have experienced that moment after telling their child to straighten his/her room when the little rebel looks you defiantly in the eye and kicks toys, game pieces, books, clothes, shoes, etc. all into a big pile.

Visible floor was not your primary goal and seeing stuft you selected especially for your sweet darling, for which you paid good money and perhaps even wrapped as a special gift, then become dirtied, disrespected and disheveled - well, let’s just calmly say there’s a dift erence between the parental goal and the child goal.

In the Feb. 5 Northwest Arkansas Times, the front-page lead article was about Fayetteville’s goals to divert more waste from the landfi ll and increase effciency in its recycling program. I get mad everytime I read that our community is recycling only 15 percent of its total waste stream and annually sending almost 51,000 tons to the landfi ll because I know we can do better. We are behaving like obstinate children who refuse to take responsibility for our stuft .

Our community, after years of grassroot and political eftort, now provides us with convenient curbside collection and two drop-oft centers for recyclables.

Now we pay as we throw so those who recycle can spend less for their smaller garbage can. A commercial program is available for small businesses, but only 190 out of 3,000 businesses use it. The city is trying difterent approaches to tap the vast apartment dwellers’ percentage of waste by providing dift erent recyclingcollection routes.

Yet what’s sorely been missing in the mechanics of keeping this recycling program going has nothing to do with trucks, routes and bins. Sometimes we need to realize success is a double-faceted process, and hands-on actions are secondary to hearts-on values, the “wanting-to” of any endeavor. Understanding that our personal waste stream is our personal responsibility is perhaps the biggest hurdle in public behavior change because like the foot-stomping kid, we don’t wanna be bothered. Kids and adults alike are in need of a dose of instruction about why cooperating is crucial to the economics of scale needed in a community eft ort like recycling. Fayetteville has always lacked an intense and ongoing education program about waste versus resources for residents, businesses and schools.

Adults tend to think if they pay for something, they are entitled to use it or not. And kids think if toys are really theirs, they have every right to kick them out the window. But neither scenario is the full story because neither citizens of a community nor members of a family are operating in a vacuum.

Parents can stop buying toys and get tough about family living standards. And, towns can increase costs and decrease services on an array of community attributes that depend on citizen involvement.

Or a town can try dift erent approaches to increase eff ciency and participation in something like recycling. One proposal mentioned in the city’s new “Solid Waste and Resource Recycling Management Plan” (accessfayetteville.org) that I vehemently oppose is called “single stream,” where recyclables are mixed together at collection andsorted by hand later.

Markets and processors of recyclable materials have always paid the most for the cleanest materials, and when you allow your stuft to casually commingle in a murky bin, the results can be a tawdry, downgraded, back-alley product headed for a low-end market. Yes, you may spend less picking it up oft the street, and sorting laziness might bring more players out of the woodwork, but once you’ve gone over to the dark, slothful side, it’s hard to get your mojo back. Sleezy behavior is like that.

Single stream recycling is like one-big-pile housekeeping, where between 12 and 25 percent of perfectly good resources become too contaminated to recycle so they are landfilled or burned. This practice gambles with the pubic trust. And, are we really too undisciplined to cleanly sort as much of ourwaste stream as humanly possible? I think we can do a lot better.

A recycling program exists to save resources, decrease landfill costs and to furnish us a personal hands-on reality check of our waste versus our resources. Keeping materials in a closed loop of use for as long as possible cuts back greenhouse gas emissions created in the extraction, transportation, and processing of virgin materials. We must not lose sight of why we are doing this.

Let your mayor and city council representatives know what you think about recycling and how we should behave toward reaching our goals in Fayetteville.

FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.

Opinion, Pages 13 on 02/12/2012

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