Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407120017
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Lon Wagner
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Right now, about 30 percent of the city's households have curbside recycling, and the addition of 7,000 households to recycling routes this fall will bring the service to only half of the residents.
When will everybody else be spared the trouble of lugging bottles, cans and newspapers to Cycle Systems in the trunks of their cars?
"Not to sound smart or anything, but I don't guess on that anymore," said Laura Wasko, the city's recycling coordinator.
So what happened? The city's refuse-collection budget took a $450,000 hit last year and again this year, and it likely will face the same crunch next year. The per-ton landfill tipping fee has been increasing $10 per year. Multiply that by the 45,000 tons of trash the city sends to the landfill every year, and there goes $1.3 million.
The fees are going up because the regional resource authority has to beef up its budget after building the new landfill at Smith Gap and the transfer station in Roanoke. All the city could afford in this year's budget was $85,000 for a new recycling truck, which will enable Wasko to bring the number of households served to 23,000.
Despite the city's inability to follow through on its four-year plan, City Manager Bob Herbert has found that residents have not lost their enthusiasm for recycling.
At one point, the city thought it might have to make recycling compulsory to meet a General Assembly mandate that 25 percent of a jurisdiction's trash be recycled.
"I never believed that there was that level of interest out there in the community," Herbert said. "Lots of people are doing it - it's just a matter of how it gets there, if you take it or if we take it."
Evidently, people are taking what once was called trash somewhere other than to the landfill. During the past five years, the city has reduced the amount of garbage it dumps in the landfill by 9,000 tons.
In 1989-90, the city took 52,105 tons of refuse to the landfill. That number, which includes some commercial waste, has dropped 2,000 or 3,000 tons yearly. In 1993-94, a year that produced a lot of storm debris, the city sent just 43,048 tons of trash to the landfill.
Wasko, hired in 1990 from Columbia, S.C., to run Roanoke's recycling effort, said factors other than recycling could have been involved in the drop.
"There's a lot of things it could be attributed to - people could be buying different items," she said, "but it's likely at least some of it is due to recycling."
For the one-third of city residents fortunate enough to be on a recycling route, the city makes it easy to save landfill space. It provides a heavy-duty garbage can with wheels on the bottom so it can be rolled to the curb every other week. Those cost $22 each, but are lent free to the homeowner.
For apartment dwellers, the city provides smaller bins, which cost the city $5.
Wasko said the city is looking at rerouting its recycling trucks, which have been following the same routes as the garbage trucks. Wasko said she has other ideas, but "there's a lot of things I would like to do, but I can only work with what I'm given."
by CNB