ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 29, 1996 TAG: 9605010006
SECTION: NEWSFUN PAGE: NF-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NANCY GLEINER STAFF WRITER
Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street used to sing about trash. Now some girls from the West End Center in Roanoke are doing the same thing. They've not on TV - not yet, at least - but they have been on the radio.
Shamia Johnson, Keeyah Brown, both 12, and Terri Chaney, 11, and a few of their friends went to the WFIR studio and recorded a song used in an advertisement about Hazardous Household Waste Collection, held last week, just before Earth Day. First, they rewrote some of the words and practiced singing it together.
The girls, including Deidre Davis, 12, who also likes to play rhythm, combined two songs by rap artist Coolio, ``Get Up, Get Down'' and ``Too Hot.''
1,2,3,4, get your trash off the floor
You gotta pick it up and put it in
You gotta pick it up and put it in
But we make our cash
All you have do is put in the trash
This is no joke, put your can in the trash
When you finish your Coke
When singers or actors are recording in the studio, they perform again and again until the people who do the recording think they've gotten it just right. The girls only had to sing the song four times. Pretty good for their first studio session.
``We were really nervous,'' Keeyah said.
``There were a lot of microphones in our faces,'' Terri added, ``and a lot of people we didn't know.''
Some of the girls who worked on the song and the recording would like to be famous singers one day. Some write their own songs now - but they're not about trash.
``Mostly, I write about love and stuff like that,'' Deidre said.
They all think what they sang about was important, though.
``If we didn't recycle, the trash would take up all of our living environment,'' Terri said.
Only Oscar the Grouch might be happy about that.
Trains have been chugging in and out of Roanoke since the city began. They'd haul coal, cargo and people. There's a new kind of train here now that makes trips every night, in and out of Roanoke, and it's the first of its kind in the United States.
It carries trash.
The Roanoke Valley throws out 750 tons - that's 1,500,000 pounds - of trash every day. It all has to go somewhere.
When garbage trucks haul your trash away from your house, the trash has to go to a landfill. It's kind of a burial ground for garbage. It's acres and acres of land where trash is dumped and covered over with dirt. Some of the trash will rot and go back into the earth. A lot of it won't.
We ran out of space in a landfill that had been used for years and needed a new place to dump our waste. So, the local governments decided it would be better and cheaper to use trains instead of trucks to carry trash to a new landfill. A rail car can certainly hold a lot more than a garbage truck. We needed a place to haul trash that was far away from where lots of people lived. A landfill far away wouldn't take up space needed for houses or buildings. And no one would smell it, either.
Here's how the system works:
Garbage trucks drive to a transfer station and dump their loads onto a concrete pad, a very large concrete pad. The trash is pushed into rail cars waiting on tracks under the building.
Every night, the train, the Waste Line Express, leaves Roanoke and pulls 10 or 12 rail cars 33 miles to the landfill. The train leaves the filled cars and takes empty ones back to the transfer station. Then, the cycle starts all over again.
At the landfill, a huge dumper - the biggest one in the country - turns the rail cars upside down, one at a time, and the trash falls onto a concrete pad. Then, the trash is pushed into 40-ton dump trucks and hauled to the landfill, called the Smith Gap landfill.
We hope this landfill will last 60 or 70 years before it gets filled. One way to make it last longer is to recycle and reuse what we can, instead of throwing all our waste into the trash.
The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority runs the Waste Line Express. The agency wrote an activity book to explain the waste disposal system so children could understand how it works.
The front and back covers were drawn by children who entered an art contest. Garrett Belcher of Penn Forest Elementary School drew the back cover and Sarah LaMotte of Cave Spring Elementary School created the winning entry that's on the front cover. More than 300 children sent drawings for the contest. |n n| Did you know:
In 1995, the Waste Line Express dumped 3,500 rail cars at the Smith Gap landfill. If each car holds 60 tons of trash, can you figure out how much waste that was? Hint: there's lots of zeros in the answer.
In 1994, 92,000 pounds of telephone books were recycled in the Roanoke Valley. That's 46 tons of paper, made from 697 trees.
A peanut butter jar has nine lives, maybe more. How many uses can you think of for an empty jar? Here's a start: use it to hold marbles, buttons, leftovers, live bait (keep it covered), as a cookie cutter, decorate it and put flowers in it for Mother's Day.
If all the aluminum cans that have been recycled since 1980 were laid end to end they would go around the Earth 2,000 times.
More than 10,000 recycling centers in the United States pay cash for recycling aluminum cans.
LENGTH: Long : 109 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL L. NEWBY II. Participating in a recording sessionby CNBat WFIR are (from left) Keeyah Brown, 12, Shamia Johnson, 12, and
Terri Chaney, 11. color.