Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 20, 1991 TAG: 9102200489
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's the wave of the future. This is the easy part right now, for residents as well as governments. Eventually, keeping recyclables apart from other garbage will likely be mandated by law everywhere in the state. That's the sensible policy, but a lot of Virginians don't relish the thought. They can delay the day by helping voluntary recycling work now.
The local governments are trying to make it easy. Roanoke County's pilot project, in North Lakes, furnishes 60-gallon rollout garbage containers to 900 households. Residents will be asked to put recyclables - plastic bottles (not glass), cans, various kinds of paper and aluminum cans - into this container.
(Later, another 800 households in Montgomery Village and Crofton will get the containers. The county also will try other means later to recycle glass.)
This commingled material will be picked up at curbside by the county's automated trucks and taken to Cycle Systems, which will charge the county $10 a ton to separate the various items for recycling. That cost compares with $19 per ton Roanoke County pays to deposit trash at the Mount Pleasant regional landfill, and with the $55 a ton that dumping is expected to cost at the new Smith Gap landfill.
Recycling won't be quite as easy in the city, for a couple of reasons.
In Roanoke, the program will start in March with 4,000 households (to be expanded to 9,000 by year's end). Each will be given a 32-gallon container with two bins, one for glass bottles and jars, the other for cans and other metal. Newspapers and plastic containers can be placed in the lower part of the cart. So there's more separating to do than in the county.
The contents of the 32-gallon containers will be collected at the curb, because the trucks that make this pickup cannot readily maneuver in narrow areas. That's a drawback in Roanoke, where residents of many neighborhoods put their garbage cans in the rear of their homes for pickup from alleys. Curbside separation makes a lot of sense, too. Everyone in their homes is pitching in. Therefore, you don't need a complicated processing facility or a big labor force to do the recyclable-separation in centralized locations.
This also could pose something of an obstacle to bringing all 38,000 city households into the program. An effort to switch all homes to curbside collection a few years ago foundered, partly because older residents objected that it would be too difficult for them to adapt. Such objections are likely to resurface during the next three or four years, as City Hall tries to make the recycling project universal.
But such problems, and other glitches likely to arise, can be handled down the road. Mixed collections of recyclables may be the most convenient system for residents. But that doesn't make it the only good system. Curbside separation makes a lot of sense, too. Everyone in their homes is pitching in. Therefore, you don't need a complicated processing facility or a big labor force to do the recyclable-separation in centralized locations.
In any case, the larger point is that recycling is beginning to take hold. Vinton already has a mandatory program, and next month the other major governments in the Roanoke Valley join the effort to sharply reduce solid-waste volume, as required by state law.
The inconvenience of recycling is minor beside the benefits. It saves us tax money; it relieves stress on landfills and the environment; it saves energy and conserves materials.
And the benefits extend beyond savings. Recycling reflects a better way of living, a better attitude about ourselves and the resources we use. We have been slow to start recycling; the challenge of making it universal remains formidable. But as experimental programs get started, Roanoke Valley residents should be proud that, while certainly not in the nation, at least in Virginia we are showing the way.
by CNB