THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605050049
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM HOLDEN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Long : 124 lines
The vision is simple: One day, citizens will dump all their paper, plastic, glass and aluminum into one big container and a garbage truck will come by and pick it up with a mechanical arm.
The co-mingled trash will be hauled to the landfill, sorted, bundled and sold at a modest profit while residents have the peace of mind that the trash they discard is not being buried or burned.
When the Earth Day celebration kicks off at Mt. Trashmore today, citizens will see the business end of this vision of an automated, city-run, curbside recycling program: a simple, 65-gallon, blue plastic container.
Two weeks after Virginia Beach pulled out of a curbside recycling program run by the Southeastern Public Service Authority it has come back with an alternative idea.
Although it has not been presented to the City Council or funded, the proposal would put the city in the forefront once again of municipal recycling efforts without the help of SPSA. And it would go miles in restoring the city's image as environmentally aware.
The decision to set aside the SPSA program came after the authority voted April 24 to impose a first time, $1 per household per month fee to fund its money-losing curbside program. The authority said it would help pay the bills, but Virginia Beach said it was really a matter of subsidizing an inefficient and poorly-run system.
SPSA-sponsored curbside recycling is likely to end July 1.
The fee would have cost the resort city $1.3 million each year, an amount that was not in the budget.
The city's idea is close to what SPSA already does, save for some important details. It would take telephone books, all colors of glass and most grades of plastic, and it would not require a strong back. A mechanical arm, the same one that picks up city garbage, would do the lifting. And it would not cost anywhere near $1.3 million.
``This has always been what we saw as the future of recycling,'' Debra C. Devine, the city's recycling coordinator since 1990, said. ``Recycling is like any other business. It has to change with the technology. We used to pick up trash with three men riding in a truck. We don't do that now. We found a better way.''
For now, the city is proposing an expansion of its existing 22 drop off centers, which take all colors of glass, aluminum, paper, magazines, plastic, telephone books and cardboard. It plans to increase the number of centers to about 50.
The city's programs have been very successful and, argued P. Wade Kyle, the administrator of the Department of Public Works and Waste Management Division, more cost effective.
Last year, SPSA collected about 9,500 tons of recyclables in its program, which cost $2.9 million to operate. Virginia Beach's drop-off centers pulled in 4,500 tons and cost less than $200,000 a year.
``Our program collects 50 percent of what SPSA collects for 15 percent of the cost,'' Kyle said.
City officials recognize that when SPSA curbside recycling stops some of that refuse will not be recycled. But they estimate about 4,500 tons of the 9,500 SPSA collects will end up in city-run drop off centers.
Devine said the proposed automated system would use the same trucks that collect garbage so there would be no additional expense for new trucks.
While nothing has been decided, she said, the new plan probably would have recyclable trash picked up on a separate schedule from non-recyclable garbage.
``We are looking at everything from once a week up to once a month collections,'' she said.
``And we're not talking about charging citizens any direct fees for this,'' she added. ``The vote was against the $1.3 million fee not against curbside recycling. Our history shows that we are very much in favor of recycling. It was a vote against the fee and bad economics.''
The plan calls for sending the recyclables to the city's current contractor for handling material, CRInc., the Massachusetts-based company that runs a processing facility at Mt. Trashmore II.
Most of the newspaper is sold in offshore Asian markets, while plastic often ends up in South Carolina carpet mills, aluminum in local markets and glass at foundries in the Richmond area.
``We could do this in a year,'' she said. ``The drop offs would be an in-between step but we would continue to have them for communities that sometimes are not eligible for curbside recycling, like some condominium and multi-family apartment complexes.''
If the city's vision of an automatic co-mingled program is adopted, the 65-gallon blue containers would one day be as common as the 90-gallon black buckets that are the starting point of the city's automated garbage collection.
City Councilman Robert K. Dean, who is also a member of the Virginia Beach Clean Community Commission, is a critic of the current SPSA system.
``You know how they pick up recyclables now?,'' Dean asked. ``You have a driver. He stops, gets out. The truck's running. He picks up first bin. Drops everything into truck, the paper, aluminum, clear glass only, plastic 1 & 2. No green and no brown glass.
``After that, he . . . walks across the street and repeats it. Gets back in his truck, and moves down a few houses. Anything they don't accept, they leave it in the blue bin and you will either have to take it to a city-run igloo or trash it.''
``We have to get efficient on this,'' Dean insisted. ``Everyone has told SPSA that labor-intensive, curbside recycling is not cost effective.''
The move to impose a fee, he said, is ``the first foot in the door of raising fees in the future.''
Many city officials bristle at the suggestion the city is not environmentally sensitive.
``Virginia Beach has been asking for two years why the collections could not be done more economically and more efficiently - co-mingled - and picked up like regular garbage,'' said Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf.
``I think you're seeing a city trying to feel its way through getting reasonable-sized government on a local level,'' she said. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MORT FRYMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
Nickyah Hazly shovels material to be sorted onto a conveyor belt at
Tidewater Fibre Corp.'s materials recovery facility.
Photo
MORT FRYMAN/The Virginian-Pilot
SPSA's labor-intensive curbside recycling has been criticized by
Beach officials. Above, workers Tracy Wilson, left, and William
Savage, sort SPSA recyclables at Tidewater Fibre Corp. in
Chesapeake.
by CNB