FitSugar

When You Recycle.....................

0fashionqueen — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:33:56 -0800

Hello Members,
How are you all doing? I hope that you all are having a great day.
The question is when you recycle do you break your recyclable down to the type of items? Or do you just put them in the recycle center? Or do you have recycling bins? If you do recycle do you have the blue bags for your recycling?

Recycling

0fashionqueen — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:33:23 -0800

Hello,
How are you all doing? I hope that you all are having a great day.
I know that this is not as difficult as it looks, but it is very important that it is started. With my group gradually growing ant that I proud because that means that I am spreading the good word. I am looking to recycle this year and I hope that you all are doing the same and I think that this is a great way to start a recycling program. Plus, think what great good we will be doing for the environment and remember that this group is to better the planet that we live on.

New Jersey: Carpet recycling gains traction in region

tdsollog — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:38:05 -0700

Found this in the Press of Atlantic City. It's an idea that should have come up years ago....

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/186/story/150003.html
Carpet recycling gains traction in region
By MICHELLE J. LEE Staff Writer, 609-272-7256
Published: Monday, May 05, 2008

GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP - A recycling milestone unfolded with the old green and yellow carpets from the Seaview Resort & Spa.
As part of a $1.5 million carpet and painting renovation, workers from Baumgardner Flooring, of Egg Harbor Township, spent three months removing tons of carpet and padding from the 297-room resort. But instead of hauling the loads to a landfill, where it would take years for the petroleum-based fabric to break down - if it ever does - all 14,000 square yards of flooring were trucked to CarpetCycle, a carpet and ceiling tile recycler based in Elizabeth, Union County.

Seaview General Manager Robert Schmeck said the changes are part of the Marriott resort's environmental initiative. On a corporate level, Marriott is developing "greener" hotels by increasing recycling, using "greener" supplies and pledging to preserve 1.4 million acres of Brazilian rainforest.

On a local level, Seaview upgraded its cooling and heating systems to be more energy-efficient and installed low-flow showerheads and toilets to conserve water, said John Petrolino, the resort's engineering director. Seaview also is working with the New Jersey Audubon Society and The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey to make its two golf courses more ecologically sound by creating bird habitats from old trees, using fewer pesticides and protecting turtles that live on the grounds.

Schmeck called the carpet recycling a no-brainer.

"This just adds to our corporate philosophy of being environmentally friendly," he said. By recycling, Seaview conserved 6,160 gallons of oil and diverted 63,000 pounds of garbage, according to an Internet calculator supplied by the Carpet America Recovery Effort, or CARE, a nonprofit recycling organization.

Petrolino and Joe Nickels, a sales manager for Baumgardner Flooring, declined to disclose how much the carpet recycling cost but said it was about the same as sending it to a landfill. "It really wasn't a matter of cost. My main thing is to get the carpet recycled than in a landfill," Petrolino said.

Carpet recycling is slowly gaining traction in Atlantic County, and the Seaview project is believed to be the largest of its kind so far. In November, the Atlantic County Utilities Authority added residential carpets to its list of recyclable materials. In five months, the authority sent nearly 50 tons of carpet to CarpetCycle. Most of the material came from homes in Egg Harbor and Galloway townships. In December, Margate became one of the first municipalities in the state to adopt a law banning carpets from being thrown out with curbside trash.

Avalon Carpet Tile and Flooring has been recycling carpets with CarpetCycle throughout its southern New Jersey stores, as have residents in Burlington County and Hawthorne, Passaic County. Others joining in the carpet-recycling effort include the Atlantic City Convention Center, which recycled 5,000 square yards in 2005, and the Egg Harbor Township and Vineland municipal buildings.

The last of the Seaview carpet arrived on the CarpetCycle sorting floor Thursday and Friday, where it was tested for yarn quality. Sean Ragiel, CarpetCycle's president, said the fiber is nylon 6, which means it will be sent to the Evergreen Nylon Recycling plant in Augusta, Ga., to be shredded and transformed into new carpeting. The padding will be taken to Chasen & Sons, a Newark company that makes mattress batting.

Recycling carpets isn't easy. Not all communities require carpet recycling, and only two companies in New Jersey - CarpetCycle and Carpet Recovery Inc., based in Newark - are certified by the state Department of Environmental Protection. The logistics of transporting the heavy materials can be tricky; Ragiel said he is limited to collecting from a 100-mile radius and the carpets must be kept dry and separate from other garbage.

The cost of such a project varies, depending on the amount of carpet and travel distance. Ragiel said he charges $100 for residential pickup in northern New Jersey and recycles residential carpets for free if dropped off.

Ragiel said his company sorts about 400 tons of carpet per month from New Jersey and New York. Since the company's inception in 1999, it has diverted 15,000 tons of carpet from landfills, most of which was sent to Georgia - where many carpet manufacturers are based - to be recycled into new flooring. Carpets made of nylon 66 and propylene are ground up and turned into new plastics for automobile parts, synthetic railroad ties and storm water drains. Carpets made of polyester fiber are burned to create energy.

Carpet-recycling awareness has been growing. Nationwide, about 5 billion pounds of carpet is dumped into landfills each year, according to CARE. In 2007, about 297 million pounds of carpet was recycled or turned into energy and other products, a 17 percent increase over 2006, according to CARE data. The organization hopes to divert 40 percent of all carpets from landfills by 2012. The recycling numbers could rise as landfill disposal rates continue to get more expensive, said Richard Dovey, president of the ACUA.

Nickels and Petrolino hoped other large businesses, hotels and the Atlantic City casinos could follow Seaview's lead and start recycling old, worn-out carpets.

"It's a coming trend with the cost of oil being the way it is. There's got to be pretty significant thinking outside the box with carpet," Nickels said. "Before, it was thrown in the Dumpster. You can see how much space carpet takes up. When you take something like that out of the trash system and put it into the recycle system, it's a pretty significant drop in the amount in landfill (waste), in weight and cubic feet."

To e-mail Michelle Lee at The Press:

MLee@pressofac.com

New Jersey: Recycling innovation could spell end of 'separation anxiety'

tdsollog — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:55:31 -0700

Found this on the Press of Atlantic City:
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/190/story/146106.html

Recycling innovation could spell end of 'separation anxiety'
By DAVID PORTER
Published: Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Across the state, usually on Mondays and Thursdays, a form of separation anxiety grips New Jerseyans - as in, which recycling bin does that egg carton go in? And what do I do with that plastic deli container?
One of the banes of the homeowner's weekly routine may soon start to ease with the advent of single-stream recycling, which doesn't require recyclables to be separated before they reach the processing plant.

The trend is receiving a boost from the $4 million conversion of a plant owned by Houston-based Waste Management that will handle single-stream recycling. The official launch is scheduled for Wednesday.

The plant will be the largest single-stream recycling facility in New Jersey, and the first in the northern part of the state. Two other, smaller single-stream facilities are operated in Pitman and New Brunswick by other companies.

New Jersey environmental officials hope it will lead to an increase in the percentage of solid waste recycled in the state, a number that has fallen gradually in the last decade.

"The theory, obviously, is that the more convenient it is and the less separation by the homeowner, the more participation," said Guy Watson, chief of bureau of recycling and planning for the state Department of Environmental Protection.
The massive, 110,000-square foot building next to Route 1 houses dozens of conveyor belts that carry an endless parade of newspapers, bottles, aluminum cans and assorted household debris.

To the naked eye, it looks like any other recycling facility. Workers still have to pick through the material for plastic bags and other non-recyclables such as garden hoses, rope and pieces of wood.

That makes up only a small part of the sorting, which partly relies on two basic principles, according to Michael Taylor, market area vice president for Waste Management Recycle America, a subsidiary of Waste Management.

"Size and gravity," Taylor said, pointing to an inclined metal deck where papers and bottles compete to reach the top.

The size and weight of the bottles compared to the paper naturally forces the bottles through holes in the deck and down onto a separate conveyor belt below. By the time the original mass of material moves further down the line, it is separated into two conveyor belts, one carrying paper and the other bottles.

In addition, the conveyor belts use electromagnets to pull off aluminum cans and optical scanners that identify plastics by their resin type, Taylor said.

The Newark plant had operated as a conventional dual-stream facility since 2003 and was handling about 7,000 tons of recycled materials per month. That number will go up to about 11,000 tons with single-stream recycling, according to Taylor.

According to statistics compiled by Waste Management, recycling increased as much as 30 percent in areas where single-stream recycling was introduced.

In contrast, New Jerseyans have been creating more waste and recycling less of it. According to statistics provided by the state DEP, state residents produced about 40 percent more waste in 2005 than they did in 1998, but recycled 34 percent of it compared to 40 percent seven years earlier.

According to Watson, factors include a significant increase in the amount of overall packaging, including non-recyclable packaging, and the lapse in 1996 of a tax supporting recycling efforts that paid for education and promotion of recycling programs.

Funding was recently restored by the Legislature, and Watson said counties have begun to be more vigilant in enforcing recycling rules. Most recycling in northern New Jersey is contracted on a town-by-town basis, which means any decision on single-stream recycling will have to follow that model.

The Newark plant opens up that possibility, Watson said.

"It could be a significant event. It's the first single-stream processing facility in the northern part of the state, and if history repeats itself, it will probably boost recycling rates."

Why recycling really matters - Ride-along traces trash's path from rubbish to resurrection

supermommie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:39:18 -0700

Why recycling really matters
Ride-along traces trash's path from rubbish to resurrection
By Elana Ashanti Jefferson
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 04/24/2008 03:51:09 AM MDT

"I definitely see the volume coming into our plants growing," says Bill Cira, Colorado district manager for Waste Management/ Recycle America. Cira oversees several recycling processing facilities like this one on Franklin Street in Denver.(Elana Ashanti)

You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by what ends up in its recycling bins.

Wine bottles and newspapers? Calling cards of the middle class. Enough bombers to sing "99 Bottles of Beer" forward and backward? College kids. Stacks of broken down furniture and electronics boxes? Young families and first-time homeowners.

Then there are areas where recycling seems to be the last thing on anyone's mind, where Denver's new purple collection carts stand empty, if residents even have them at all.

"You would think that everyone would want to do it," Angelo Santistevan, a driver for Denver Recycles, said one morning while scooping up full carts with the mechanical arm on his PendPac/Peterbilt truck and then depositing the empty carts back by the curb. "It really cuts down on the trash."
Not long ago, few people contemplated their trash. John and Jane Q. Public generally employed a use-it and lose-it mentality about everything from soda cans and TV dinner trays to old tires and ripped-up furniture.

But now, people worry about hotter summers and colder winters, about international crises propelled by a mutual addiction to depleting natural resources, and about safeguarding the planet for future generations.

Eco-anxiety is real, and on the rise.

In a condition some researchers have dubbed Waking-Up Syndrome, anxiety over global warming and each individual's responsibility for it surfaces in phases akin to the early stages of grieving: denial, slow acknowledgment, despair, anger and then action.

An event with innocent beginnings - a trip to the farmers market, falling in love with a new bicycle, giving the living room a fresh coat of paint - starts a spiral into full-on green guilt as a nagging question takes hold in your mind like a bad song from drive-time radio: Where does my garbage go?

Garbage as a resource

If it's not recycled, the answer is infuriatingly simple: landfills.

That means that all my garbage and your garbage and the garbage of everyone we know is compacted underground, covered with top soil, seeded and then poked with pipes that monitor and release refuse-induced methane gas. That gas either burns off, becoming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or is diverted into expensive alternative-energy plants.
With so many people "waking up" to the reality of greenhouses gases, work has been busy for Santistevan. As his truck rumbled south on Federal Boulevard, the 31-year-old Denver native described a typical day on the job:

He awakes at 5 a.m., then rouses his two youngest kids. The three head out of their house in unincorporated Adams County about 40 minutes later. Santistevan drops off the kids at their grandmother's house in north Denver, then heads for the Solid Waste Management offices and garage on Decatur Street just south of Invesco Field.
He checks on his truck, then grabs a cup of coffee. "I ain't a morning person."

At around 6:30 a.m., a supervisor leads Santistevan and the other recycling drivers through a meeting about the day's routes, department news or new procedures.

By 7 a.m. - but never earlier because of city noise ordinances - Santistevan is in the right-side driver's seat of his truck, where a small screen provides a live video feed from cameras over "the hopper," or holding container, and the back of the vehicle. The screen is next to a control panel Santistevan uses to operate lights and a hydraulic lift, and just above a joystick he uses to control the metal jaws that latch on to each purple cart.
"My dad has been with Solid Waste since '74, before I was even around," he said. "If it was good enough for him to raise his family, it's good enough for me."

Like a good neighbor

Along Santistevan's recycling pickup route, residents stop him to ask questions about large-item pickup and other garbage-disposal issues that he knows little about. Others like to time his pickup or wait so they can snatch back their carts just as soon as he empties them. "There are some people who just want to come out and see the truck," he said.

A cold, unopened can of Pepsi waited on top of one cart. And you can bet Santistevan finds a few batches of cookies at Christmastime.

He likes the job, but it has its challenges. On blocks thick with parked cars, maneuvering the truck between them can be trickier than fishing a stuffed animal out of an arcade game. In alleys, "We've got to deal with the trees and the garages and the power lines," he said, not to mention the occasional drug deal (or drug bust).

Shredded paper tends to pick up and fly away instead of landing in the hopper, and picking up along busy streets can be downright treacherous.

"People are in such a hurry that they're going around you or they're riding on your tail or they cut you off," he said. "They don't show too much respect."

By midmorning, Santistevan's cellphone chimes with the Jay-Z song "Roc Boys" as fellow drivers decide where to meet for lunch. They like CiCi's Pizza or Sam Taylor's Bar-B-Q or Gunther Toody's. Eating together gives them a chance to debrief about the morning and if need be, help wrap up each other's work.

"I don't think I could sit in an office," Santistevan said. "I don't want to put it down, but I've got a better view."

Words go here

Recycling drivers like Santistevan and others from municipalities across the Front Range take their loads to Waste Management's single- stream processing center at 5395 Franklin St. in Denver. There, the whir of industrial gears and factory conveyor belts is a constant soundtrack for the roughly 100 people who staff the plant up to 20 hours-a-day.

A tractor scoops away parts of the mountain of recyclable refuse dumped in the yard and pushes it toward a sorting system. There, in a scene reminiscent of Lucille Ball attempting to sort truffles flowing down a conveyor belt in a famous "I Love Lucy," episode, Waste Management employees wearing two layers of gloves stand next to conveyor belts and pick out nonrecyclable junk, such as strollers, hoses, bicycles and spiral-bound notebooks.

The recyclables move on through the system and emerge as tight bales of paper, aluminum, cardboard, glass and plastic that Waste Management markets and sells to companies producing post-consumer recycled products that include fleece jackets and glass mulch.

The processing plant deals with more materials all the time, according to Bill Cira, Colorado district manager for Waste Management's Recycle America program. "If you take all the materials that we're processing out of my plants in a year's time and load them up on a train, those cars would stretch from Denver all the way to Pueblo."

Demands are high

The challenges for the Denver sorting facility include keeping up with the workload. A half-day off to replace one piece of equipment can result in enough backed-up bottles and cans to mirror the Foothills. Those materials wait to be sorted in an uncovered yard and become more difficult to handle in inclement weather. And keeping trained labor for such physically taxing and monotonous work can be difficult.

Is all of this recycling making a difference? There's growing suspicion that recycling is actually more expensive than it's worth. In garbage-choked New York City, for example, the cost of processing a ton of recycling from collection to commercial redistribution is about $239, according to The Gotham Gazette. The cost of processing a ton of garbage, without recycling any of it, is $132.

"The way I look at it," Cira said, "is we're greatly reducing the amount of new raw materials that we need to mine and farm for production. By recycling all those raw materials, we are reducing the carbon footprint (and) reducing the amount of natural materials we need to use. That goes a long way toward balancing the scale."

A case for recycling

Arguments in favor of recycling become easier to make once concerned citizens get a look at a place like "DADS Landfill," or Waste Management's 4-square-mile Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site on South Gun Club Road in Aurora. This is the largest landfill in the area and one of the five largest in the country. Those rolling grassy hills at the far east end of East Hampden Avenue may look placid but are in fact Section 31, roughly 210 acres of compacted trash that took 11 years to fill to capacity.

Three million tons a year, or roughly 12,000 tons of trash a day, come to DADS. After being weighed and charged a disposal fee, garbage trucks from across the Front Range now dump their loads into Section 32 where Mad Max-looking bulldozers with gigantic studded tires push the trash down into the earth, roll back over it with topsoil, and repeat.

"We sell space here," facility engineer and site manager Doc Nyiro said during a recent tour. "The more we can pack that waste in, the more we can be competitive with the other landfills in the area."

DADS is also home to the Lowry Landfill Superfund site, where 138 million gallons of industrial waste were disposed of in the 1960s and 1970s, before environmental engineers like Nyiro understood the full environmental impact.

Waste Management, the largest of four major waste disposal companies in Colorado, predicts that there's enough space at DADS to serve the Front Range for about another century. The facility could last longer if if people continue to recycle, and buy products made from recycled materials.

"You'll see a lot of paper here," Nyiro said as the smell of diesel and dirty diapers wafted into a tour bus parked on top of roughly 120 feet of garbage.

"You'll see a lot of cardboard, a lot of plastic, a lot of stuff that can be recycled," he said. "There's definitely room for improvement."

Elana Ashanti Jefferson: ejefferson@denverpost.com or 303-954-1957

How to rid yourself of stuff that can't go in the recycling bin

Shiloh Jolie Pitt — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:57:53 -0700

ReadyMade magazine

A Flash In The Can

How to rid yourself of stuff that can't go in the recycling bin
by Jennifer Boulden and Heather Stephenson
photo credit: Alex Farnum

Anyone who’s ever moved from a larger place into a smaller one knows how difficult it can be to jettison unwanted stuff in an environmentally friendly way-especially when it’s bulky, of unknown origin, or the type of thing that requires wearing a Hazmat suit to recycle. Seeking answers, ReadyMade enlisted the help of Ideal Bite, a daily email newsletter devoted to “light-green living,” to create a crib sheet for those with the urge to purge. Downsizers, don’t leave home without it.

APPAREL

Clothing Free up some closet space by giving away that big sack of old threads. Donate women’s professional outfits to Dress for Success (www.dressforsuccess.org), a nonprofit that helps disadvantaged women find jobs. The Salvation Army (www.salvationarmy.org) will take your tees with open arms. If you want to trade, invite friends over for a frock swap, or haul your garb to a Buffalo Exchange store (www.givethegiftofsight.org).

Shoes More than 16 million pairs of sneakers have been recycled through projects like Nike’s Reuse-a-Shoe, which grinds up worn-out soles and converts them to basketball and tennis courts and running tracks. Find out where to drop off your worn-out kicks (whether or not they’re Nikes) at www.nike.com/nikebiz/reuseashoe.

AUTOMOBILE

Motor oil If it’s disposed of improperly, used oil can render fallow a four-acre area of soil for more than 20 years. But recyclers can re-refine it to create lubricating oil. Many auto shops, including Jiffy Lube and Kragen, will take the stuff off your hands.

Wheels Car tires make up 2 percent of all solid waste in landfills. Retailers like Big O and Goodyear will accept old tires for a few dollars apiece, and most local waste management companies organize free collection days. The road-weary rubber gets recycled into playground surfacing, soil additives, and flooring.

CHEMICALS

Cleaners Donate your out-of-use under-the-sink stash to a shelter or other nonprofit (call ahead), or visit www.freecycle.org to find people who’ll cart away your spray bottles and powder cans.

Medication In recent studies, more than 80 percent of rivers sampled contained chemicals from antibiotics, birth control pills, and/or antidepressants, largely because of flushed or dumped meds. The Starfish Project (www.thestarfishproject.org) redistributes certain meds to countries in Africa, while some states, such as Ohio and Wisconsin, run local repository programs. For expired prescriptions, call your pharmacy to see if it’ll accept them for incineration.

Paint If kicked to the curb, a single gallon of the conventional stuff can seep into the earth and pollute 250,000 gallons of drinking water. Earth 911 (www.earth911.org) lists local drop-off locations for both reuse (or proper disposal) and can recycling.

ELECTRONICS

Batteries Some stores (Ikea, for one) will take your alkalines for proper disposal, but you can actually recycle rechargeable batteries when they reach the end of their long lives (you can use them up to 1,000 times). They do contain hazardous chemicals like cadmium, though, so take them to a specialized drop spot (check www.rbrc.org for locations).

Cell phones Rather than sending your expired handset to join the more than 500 million mobile phones already in landfills, bring it back to the store where you bought it-T-Mobile and Verizon will recycle all brands of used cell phones. If you don’t have access to a store, check out Collective Good (www.collectivegood.com), where you can turn cell donations into cash for your choice of charity.

Computers About three-quarters of obsolete PCs-each with an average weight of 60 pounds-are sent to landfills. The Cristina Foundation (http://www.cristina.org">www.cristina.org) will pick up any old-but-working machine for redistribution to someone who can use it. Trade in newish computers through recycling programs organized by tech companies like Toshiba (www.toshiba.eztradein.com) or HP (www.hp.com/united-states/tradein). To find local spots to donate dead computers, visit E-cycling Central (www.eiae.org).

Fax machines Clear some space in your office by sending and receiving faxes digitally via eFax (www.efax.com) or MyFax (www.myfax.com), then list your hulking machine at Throwplace (www.throwplace.org) and send it in as a donation.

Ink The average printer cartridge can take more than 450 years to decompose. The Funding Factory (www.fundingfactory.com) and RecycleFund (www.recyclefund.com) will pony up cash for empty cartridges, then recycle them. Many national office-supply stores also accept ink cartridges.

MATERIALS

Appliances Looking to upgrade your oven or fridge, and need a place to donate your old one? Habitat for Humanity (www.habitat.org), a charity that builds homes for those who can’t afford them, will pass along your in-working-order castoffs to a family in need.

Carpet More than 2.5 million tons of rugs are discarded each year. Get a list of recyclers nationwide from Carpet America Recovery Effort (www.carpetrecovery.org), launched by carpet producers and the EPA, or donate like-new shag to Habitat for Humanity.

Plastics Just because there’s a number inside the arrows on the bottom of your yogurt container doesn’t mean it belongs in the recycling bin. Plastics #1 and #2 (detergent and water bottles, and food containers) are accepted by most municipal programs. Plastics #3–#7 (Styrofoam, shrink wrap, padded envelopes, product display casing, many to-go boxes, and yes, yogurt containers) are more difficult to recycle. If your city’s recycling program doesn’t accept them, try to reuse the items you can’t avoid acquiring in the first place.

Roofing. Construction jobs generate 11 million tons of asphalt shingle waste each year. If you’ve recently reroofed, www.earth911.org has a directory of recyclers who’ll turn old shingles into pavement and new roofing.

Wallboard About 12 percent of new drywall doesn’t survive installation. Luckily, it’s made from gypsum, a mineral that can be recycled into new drywall or used for cement production. Head to www.earth911.org for drop sites.

MEDIA

Books Got tomes that are gathering dust? Trade them in at your local used bookstore, or drop them at the library. You can also list unwanted volumes on Book Crossing (www.bookcrossing.com), a free service that alerts users to books left in public places.

Computer CDs, DVDs; jewel cases; VHS tapes Recycle these through Act Recycling (www.actrecycling.org), a nonprofit that helps people with disabilities find work. GreenDisk (www.greendisk.com) will take any hardware lying around the office (up to 20 pounds of monitors, cords, mice, and so forth) for $6.95.

Paperwork Clear out your filing cabinet by scanning photos and paper documents. Digitize photos on sites like Flickr (www.flickr.com). Check with your local waste management service about photo paper, and recycle all standard-issue stock after digitizing records, articles, and any other notes you can’t bear to part with.

San Francisco: A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More

tdsollog — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:16:58 -0700

Found this on the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/us/07garbage.html?th&emc=th

A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More

By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: May 7, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO - Mayor Gavin Newsom is competitive about many things, garbage included. When the city found out a few weeks ago that it was keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of local landfills, he embraced the statistic the way other mayors embrace winning sports teams, improved test scores or declining crime rates.

The San Francisco Recycling Center processes about 750 tons of recyclables a day, and Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to add to that total.

So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended.

“Without that, we don’t think we can get to 75 percent,” the mayor said of the proposal. His aides said it stood a good chance of passing.

How does he describe his fixation with recycling dominance? “It’s purposefulness that could otherwise be construed as ego,” Mr. Newsom said. “You want to be the greatest city. You want to be the leading city. You want to be on the cutting edge. I’m very intense about it.”

In a more businesslike tone, Jared Blumenfeld, the director of the city’s environmental programs, addressed one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle. “The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper,” Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent to China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and toys sold in big-box stores.

Not that Mr. Blumenfeld does not have a competitive streak of his own. San Francisco can charge more for its scrap paper, he said, because of its low levels of glass contamination. That is because about 15 percent of the city’s 1,200 garbage trucks have two compartments, one for recyclables. That side has a compactor that can compress mixed loads of paper, cans and bottles without breaking the bottles. (These specially designed trucks, which run on biodiesel, cost about $300,000 apiece, at least $25,000 more than a standard truck, said Benny Anselmo, who manages the fleet for Norcal.)

Another major innovation in the past decade was the development of infrastructure for turning food wastes - a major part of the waste stream in a city with thousands of restaurants - into baggable compost that is used in California’s vineyards and the vast farms of the Central Valley.

The garbage from San Francisco’s 750,000 residents is picked up on the pay-as-you-throw principle - the more garbage bins you need, the higher your monthly fee. (The average customer pays $23.58 a month.) Also, in the past couple of years, it has banned plastic grocery bags and permitted the recycling of hard plastic toys.

The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs, devoted to different materials, including regular garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint.

“When we look at garbage, we don’t see garbage, O.K.?” said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems, the parent company of Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling Company, the main garbage collectors in the city. “We see food, we see paper, we see metal, we see glass.”

The recycling rate for this curbside collection from homes, hotels and the city’s 5,000 restaurants is considerably lower than the overall rate, Mr. Reed said, in part because the rates on other waste streams - construction debris or material, like batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs, that the public brings in to special centers - is much higher.

Much of the concrete from demolished buildings, for instance, is recycled in new sidewalks. Another recycling stream is born of the community’s design sensitivities. “People are doing very well here,” Mr. Reed said. “They remodel, and they paint. On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, people line up to bring us paint” at a facility built for the purpose.

“We separate it into flat and latex, screen it to take out the chunks, and blend it in 55-gallon drums,” he said.

The three resulting colors - off-white, beige and green - are packed in five-gallon tins and sent to local nonprofit organizations, schools or charitable institutions in Mexico.

Norcal’s subsidiaries handle 3,545 tons of waste a day in San Francisco, out of about 7,800 generated citywide, Mr. Reed said. About 55 percent of Norcal’s total goes to the landfill; the rest is recycled. These figures become part of the calculation of the city’s overall diversion rate of 70 percent, which is the figure it just reported for 2006.

As John Sitts, of the state’s integrated waste management board, said, “the diversion rate includes recycling, composting and source reduction” - the last term representing “everything businesses and residents do to reuse things rather than throwing them out.”

The Los Angeles region most recently reported a 59 percent diversion rate, a number still being audited by state regulators. San Jose, at 62 percent, claims the best-in-class crown for cities of 900,000 or more. Statewide, the figure for 2006 was 54 percent.

With the exception of Chicago, which boasted a 55 percent rate in 2006 - the most recent year for which national comparisons are available - Eastern and Midwestern cities lagged well behind their California counterparts. According to the most recent annual survey of the trade magazine Waste News, in 2006 New York City was at 30.6 percent, Milwaukee at 24 percent, Boston at 16 percent and Houston at 2.5 percent.

San Francisco’s system is being noticed overseas. Mr. Blumenfeld’s calendar is full of meetings with officials from Germany and China, most of whom visit Norcal’s facilities, including the food-waste composting centers.

His visitors are learning, Mr. Blumenfeld said, that “you can recycle almost anything.”

S.F. OKs toughest recycling law in U.S.

stephley — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:21:15 -0700

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/10/MN09183NV8.D...
((I took out some local, political details, and composting tips ))

Throwing orange peels, coffee grounds and grease-stained pizza boxes in the trash will be against the law in San Francisco, and could even lead to a fine.

The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Tuesday to approve Mayor Gavin Newsom's proposal for the most comprehensive mandatory composting and recycling law in the country. It's an aggressive push to cut greenhouse gas emissions and have the city sending nothing to landfills or incinerators by 2020.

"San Francisco has the best recycling and composting programs in the nation," Newsom said, praising the board's vote on a plan that some residents had decried as heavy-handed and impractical. "We can build on our success."

The ordinance is expected to take effect this fall.

The legislation calls for every residence and business in the city to have three separate color-coded bins for waste: blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash.

Failing to properly sort your refuse could result in a fine after several warnings, but Newsom and other officials say fines will only be levied in the most egregious cases.

Fines for almost all residential customers and many small businesses - anyone who generates less than a cubic yard of refuse a week - are initially capped at $100. Businesses that don't have proper bins face escalating fines up to $500...

"In any scenario there will be repeated notices and phone calls before we even start talking about fines," said Jared Blumenfeld, head of the city's Department of the Environment. "We don't want to fine people."

The proposal, hailed as an effective way to cut about two-thirds of the 618,000 tons of waste the city sent to landfill in 2007, drew resistance from some apartment building owners when details emerged about a year ago. And some residents were upset over the possibility of inspectors checking their garbage.

The ordinance calls for garbage collectors to leave tags on containers when they spot incorrectly sorted material, but those collectors are only going to view what's on top of the container and have no intention of going through them, said Robert Reed, a spokesman for San Francisco collectors Sunset Scavenger Co. and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Co., subsidiaries of Recology, formerly Norcal Waste Systems.

"Our role is to pick up the garbage and to make recycling as easy and convenient as possible for our customers," Reed said. "Our collection drivers will not become enforcers."

City officials would levy any fines, and the legislation doesn't provide funding for new trash inspectors.

"It doesn't create trash police," Blumenfeld said...

...Cities from Pittsburgh to San Diego have mandatory recycling. None, however, requires all food waste to be composted. Seattle passed a law in 2003 requiring people to have a compost bin but, unlike San Francisco, it did not mandate that all food waste go in there.

Newsom floated the mandatory recycling idea in April 2008 as he faced the city's self-imposed goals of having a 75 percent recycling rate in 2010, with zero waste by 2020.

The rationale behind the move is clear. Material like food scraps and plant clippings that go into landfills take up costly space and decompose to form methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

A June 2008 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group focused on environmentally sound community development, said a zero waste approach is one of the fastest, cheapest and most effective ways to protect the climate. Cutting waste sent to landfills and incinerators would be like closing 21 percent of U.S. coal-fired power plants, the report said.

About 36 percent of what San Francisco sends to landfill is compostable, and another 31 percent is recyclable, a comprehensive study found...

By the city's count, it currently diverts 72 percent of its waste, best in the nation. If recyclables and compostables going into landfills were diverted, the city's recycling rate would jump to 90 percent, Blumenfeld said...

"Once people start to compost," he said, "they find it easy to do."

One hang-up, of course, is the perceived yuck factor.

"It's a false phobia that things are going to smell," Reed said. "It's the same garbage you already had, it's just handling it differently, in a more environmentally responsible way."

Reconnect: Give your old, unwanted technology new life through recycling

tdsollog — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:10:08 -0700

RECONNECT is a comprehensive electronics recovery, reuse and environmentally responsible recycling opportunity for
for consumers in participating communities.

RECONNECT offers FREE drop-off recycling and reuse options for unwanted electronics.

It's about working together.
Goodwill Industries and Dell partnered to create RECONNECT, a free program for consumers to reuse and responsibly recycle unwanted electronics.

It’s easy and it’s free.
Simply bring in your donation to your participating local Goodwill store or Goodwill donation drop-off site.
It's not just the environment that benefits.

Proceeds from resale value of donations will be returned to Goodwill Industries to support their mission of creating job opportunities for individuals with barriers to employment.

http://www.reconnectpartnership.com/

RECYCLE!

jaymiesha — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:17:20 -0800

I finish 10 bottles of water every day and I collect my cans and bottles to recycle every month! It bugs me to see people throw their plastics/cans away when they should totally recycle! Not for cash purposes, but for the sake of the earth!

Let's try to cut back from our old habits and make a difference!

We may think that recycling is a little thing, but imagine how much and what you're saving!

XOXO
jaym