
DATE: Monday, July 21, 1997                 TAG: 9707210038
SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY TOM HOLDEN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:  119 lines

RECYCLED CURBSIDE PROGRAM BEGINS BEACH WILL START DELIVERING BIG BLUE BINS TO TRANTWOOD RESIDENCES TODAY.

The moment has finally come. Curbside recycling has returned.

The first of 85,000 blue plastic bins will be delivered to residents of Trantwood today, the beginning of a roll-out of shiny new blue bins that will let residents recycle just about anything within reason.

Come October, every single-family home in the city should have a new 95-gallon bin to place right next to the black bins now used for non-recyclable household refuse. By early fall, the city will then begin delivering 18,700 smaller, 18-gallon bins to townhomes.

The new 95-gallon containers, several times larger than the old variety, will be collected every other week. They're intended to hold a large variety of recyclable material - including newspapers, cardboard, junk mail, catalogs, brown, clear and green glass, aluminum, tin and all grades of plastic.

The material will be collected every other week by Tidewater Fibre Corp. using trucks exactly like the ones the city uses to collect non-recyclable household waste from homes each week. The company's trucks will take the material to its Chesapeake facility, where it will be sorted, bundled by type, and sold to waste commodities markets the world over.

``People wanted recycling, and I liked this plan because it was comprehensive, it was user-friendly, and I think it takes the city to the next level in its efforts to become environmentally aware,'' said City Councilman Linwood O. Branch III, who helped champion the project.

``Recycling is near and dear to many people's hearts,'' he said.

In 1988, Virginia Beach became the first South Hampton Roads city to offer a recycling program, and by 1995 it led the region, with public participation reaching 58 percent.

Last year, amid much public consternation, the city dropped out of a curbside recycling program run by the Southeastern Public Service Authority in a dispute over money and service.

Since then it has set out to find contractors willing to take on the job of recycling, and find money to pay for its expanded program. The new program will cost $3.7 million, making it the region's most expensive. The city claims it will save about $2 million a year in landfill disposal fees, so the actual annual costs will be about $1.7 million, about $1.50 per household per month.

As a stopgap, the city expanded its drop-off program to 50 sites. It will continue to run 22 drop-off centers while schools will continue to take paper - mostly newspapers.

Because the bins are so large, the program has the potential of recycling 45,000 tons of trash a year. Under the SPSA plan, the most it could collect was 10,000, the city has said.

To make this new program work, a small group of city workers have toiled for months in their ``bunker'' on Holland Road, working out daunting logistics that are the underpinning for the city's new recycling program.

``Many people have done a lot of good work to make this work,'' said Barry Shockley, the curbside program's project coordinator. Planners tapped dozens of city departments to develop its plan, including mapping, public works, public affairs, the treasurer's office and schools.

Wade Kyle, the city's waste management administrator, said the plans are so complete that there are even contingencies for how to handle a spill of hydraulic fluid if a truck springs a leak.

The roll-out itself is a complicated affair. Shockley and his fellow workers have divided the city into eight districts with two routes per section. Distribution of recycling bins will generally move from west to east within each district.

The city hopes to deliver 1,500 bins a day. Residents will receive an information packet explaining how the program works, when they can expect service and whom to call when problems arise. For accounting purposes, each bin will be assigned a number, and each number will be assigned to a specific residence so the city can answer service questions.

Given the complexities of the plan, some residents may see neighbors receiving a bin while they have not, Shockley said, adding that patience is the watchword of the distribution plan.

While the new bins may ease the work of some environmentally sensitive citizens, they will add a headache to thousands who never liked the big black plastic garbage cans and now will have another equally large bin to store.

The city does not like to say it, but residents have the option of saying no to the bins.

But Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf, who received a ceremonial first bin during a curbside unveiling on Friday at City Hall, said she hopes all residents will give them a try, if only to help the city save money by lowering the cost of disposing of trash in the landfill.

``We had a temporary hiccup last year when service was interrupted,'' she said. ``Now I can say, `Just push it to the curb. We'll take it from there.' '' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Illustration]

CURBSIDE RECYCLING AT VIRGINIA BEACH: WHAT'S NEW

GRAPHIC

JOHN EARLE

The Virginian-Pilot

SOURCE: City of Virginia Beach

[For a copy of the graphic, see microfilm for this date.]

RECYCLING FACTS:

The United States generates more garbage than any other nation

on Earth, twice as much per person as Europe.

Each U.S. household throws out an average of 13,000 pieces of

paper, 1,800 plastic items, 500 aluminum cans and 500 glass bottles

a year.