Commentary: Getting out of the hole

Don’t pamper non-recyclers; require personal responsibility

" Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at the sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

-- Zora Neale Hurston

Fayetteville's goals are sometimes lofty, but being without goals is like being without dreams. What's the point of anything if we do not seek a better way of doing what we need or want to do?

Currently Fayetteville is in a master planning process to figure out how to decrease the waste it is now landfilling, a process prompted by a 2013 City Council resolution to aim high by keeping 80 percent of our trash out of holes in the ground.

The city hired consultants for this plan, who are trying to figure out what we really are willing to do as a community. Personally, I'd like to know what top limits we could reach if we all actually took responsibility for our personal refuse and for the consequences it inflicts on the planet. Our local curbside trash and recycling program is about as convenient and easy as any citywide collection could possibly be, so those who don't utilize it must think they are somehow exempt from being accountable for their own waste. Do they also think the city should come into their homes and flush their toilets for them? Sewage sanitation is mandatory, and frankly, proper solid waste (trash) sanitation should be as well.

Basically what the people of our town need to decide at this planning juncture is whether we want to save resources or throw them away. It's really as simple as that.

Recycling is like any other service. It costs to collect, process and market trash toward becoming reusable resources. But, metal ore, tree pulp, oil and gas (for plastic) and sand (for glass) are saved from being extracted as raw materials, and mining, drilling, cutting and blasting are avoided when items we throw away are reused instead. Also, it takes less energy to reprocess materials than to manufacture them from new sources.

Although Fayetteville has more than 60 percent participation of residents who recycle, folks still aren't bothering to take enough out of their waste streams to increase the 9 percent diversion rate that their recyclables amount to in the overall 50,443 tons of waste we generate annually. This 9 percent has been flat-lined for a long time, but could be raised considerably. Another 11 percent is yard waste diverted from landfilling by the city's composting facility, but this combined 20 percent still leaves a whopping amount of resources going into a hole that is growing into a mountain. The non-participation of those who won't take responsibility for their waste, as well as a lack of more extensive commercial recycling and composting opportunities, are areas needing serious improvement.

Our town has a good reputation for clean materials, which makes marketing our sorted items easier than for those towns that toss their so-called recyclables into one container. Mixing materials in massive trucks breaks glass and soils paper, making the contamination rate high and recyclables' marketability low.

The consultants' dilemma is to recommend ways to maximize capturing the waste streams that can be turned into marketable materials or usable compost in cost-efficient ways. They are proposing pilot projects for commercial food waste composting and single-steam (recyclables in one container) mixing for multi-family complexes (translation: student apartments, mostly).

Although the consultants say newer technology is lowering the cross contamination in single-stream recycling, multitudes of articles I read on the subject indicate there's a long way to go yet to keep single-stream collections clean enough to market at top prices. High-tech machines always come at high costs. We could save ourselves a lot of money and take pride in our community's behavior if we stop pampering lazy citizens and require all waste be personally managed. There are low-tech ways that save money rather than burying it down a hole.

Recycling is a habit and a way of life that should be taught and expected rather than begged and sacrificed for by citizens and governments. And, ideally products should be made only if disposal of them is possible by reuse or by composting, and they should be designed for recyclability. This will never happen until we stop kicking the can down the road, but instead pick it up and use it again.

Commentary on 06/16/2015

Upcoming Events