By Randy Gaddo
Keep Peachtree Beautiful volunteer
The Keep Peachtree City Beautiful (KPTCB) program was nominated for the 2011 Green City Awards sponsored by Waste and Recycling News.
While Peachtree City’s fledgling 2-year old program didn’t win an award, it did give program coordinators an opportunity to measure their progress against other more-established programs.
“We are proud of what we’ve been able to do with this program in two short years,” said KPTCB Executive Director Al Yougel. “Through the cooperation and participation of the city council and staff, citizens and volunteers we’ve elevated the recycling effort here from near-obscurity to a highly-visible and growing citizen-driven effort.”
The competition was based on evaluation in several categories, such as recycling rate, participation rate, the variety of recycling opportunities and how news of the program is communicated locally.
Peachtree City’s recycle rate rose from about 2% in 2009 to the current 15%. Recycle rate is the total recycled materials as a percentage of the total solid waste collected in the measurement area. The number of citizens recycling, known as the city’s participation rate, went from a negligible percentage to nearly 25% today.
The city’s nomination was strong in terms of the various forms of communication used to promote the program and involve citizens. The city’s website features special recycling announcements and has a link to the KPTCB site, which contains a video introduction to the program, a link to listings of recycling opportunities and a link to expedite volunteer signup.
The KPTCB director makes monthly oral PowerPoint-assisted reports to the city council, updating them on projects and accomplishments during their regular public meetings. There are also separate flyers about the City’s recycle drop off stations and one for home recycling information. KPTCB volunteers man booths at several community events throughout the year and generate local newspaper coverage on special recycling events. The city’s Public Information Officer includes KPTCB information in the “Update,” an electronic newsletter that is sent weekly to citizens and the media.
When most people open the lid of their 85-gallon trash can and plop the over-stuffed plastic bag on top of other similarly stuffed bags, jam the lid down and haul it to the street on garbage pickup day, they don’t really care about what’s in it.
They don’t care, but for the life of the planet, for the future of their children and grand children, they should care. And they should know there is something they can do about it: recycle!
In Peachtree City and nationally, the average resident produces about four and one-half pounds of waste per person, every day. At a current city population of 34,000, that averages about 153,000 pounds of waste, each and every day. In a week that rate mushrooms to more than 1 million pounds. The math beyond that is simply staggering.
The waste comes in many forms: plastic food containers and wrapping, Styrofoam, food, plastic, glass, aluminum, steel, tin, paper. Of these items, a significant percent of them are recyclable. In the stuffed plastic bag in the curbside trash can, these items are worthless and possibly harmful, destined for a landfill near you. But distributed to the right place, they could help save the planet.
Some of the aforementioned items are the “acceptable” materials for landfills. Also in many of those bags are unacceptable items: paints, TVs, light bulbs, motor oil, batteries, and electronics. These are the items that should not be in a landfill and many are not even recyclable. Some, like motor oil, fluorescent bulbs and paints must be singled out for special disposal.
So what’s a busy Peachtree City family to do? Well, since August 14, 2009 they can call any of the sanitation companies licensed to operate in the city for curbside recycling service, at no additional cost.
“The types of items recycled may vary by company, so contact your sanitation company to see which items they accept and by what schedule they operate,” suggests Al Yougel, who leads other volunteers as Director of Keep Peachtree City Beautiful.
Yougel also points out that the companies offer “single stream” pick up, which means the items to be recycled do not have to be separated, but can be mixed together in the recycling bin provided by the sanitation company.
“You can put your aluminum cans, clear or colored glass or all types of plastic bottles, cardboard, magazines and newspapers into one bin for recycling and keep them out of your household trash bag,” he says. The bins are placed by the homeowner at curbside for scheduled pickups.
Single stream collection makes it infinitely easier for people to do the right thing and recycle, but does that mixed recyclable material actually get separated and recycled? Some trust that to be so, but verify to be sure.
Peachtree City citizen Kim Learnard is one of those. She enlisted Yougel’s assistance in setting up a visit to the site where all of Peachtree City waste haulers take their recyclable materials, SP Recycling Corporation on Frontage Road in Forest Park.
“Call me a skeptic, but I never truly believed that my recyclables ended up where they should, hauled away, separated, packaged and sold for re-use, until I saw it with my own eyes,” admitted Learnard in a blog she hosts as a city council member.
The several-acre SP facility, called an MRF or material recovery facility, is an impressive and imposing facility that is in perpetual motion. It is definitely a hard-hat area where everything appears to be happening at once. Enormous transfer trucks automatically unload tons of mixed recyclables as skid loaders bustle back and forth dumping loads of it onto huge conveyor belts that carry it 30-feet into the air before magically separating it onto other conveyors that radiate throughout the plant.
“The ingenuity behind the conveyors and rollers used to automatically separate the recoverables would make General Motors jealous,” writes Learnard, an electrical engineer. “To sum it up, paper goes north, plastics go south, glass heads east, aluminum cans go west and cardboard goes, well, southwest.”
This description, while oversimplified, is nevertheless indicative of the continuous flow of “recoverables,” which is the term used in the industry for recyclables. The process is highly automated, but employees help at key areas to ensure everything is going where it should.
As recoverables are quarantined into separate areas, they are bundled and sold for reuse in specific markets. For example, recovered newspaper goes to SP Newsprint, a 100% recycled newsprint mill in Dublin, Georgia that processes 2,000 tons per day. Recovered plastics go to several markets, including the carpet industry in north Georgia, the bottle industry in South Carolina and trash can manufacturing in North Carolina.
Counter to what some people might think, there is a growing market for recoverables. It is becoming more self-evident that there is finite acreage for landfills and it will run out sooner rather than later if something isn’t done.
The CEO of the National Solid Wastes Management Association remembers it was all about how much could be stuffed into a garbage truck when he first started in the trash business decades ago; now, he said, it’s about how much can be taken off.
“When I first got into the industry, compaction ratio was the most important thing,” said Bruce Parker in a Waste Recycling News interview. “Now there’s plenty of talk about waste diversion.”
Diversion refers to siphoning off recoverables before they get put into the trash bag that ends up in a landfill. The Fayette County Solid Waste Management Plan called for a 25% diversion rate by 2012, and, “We as a county are falling terribly short on meeting even that conservative goal,” said Learnard. By contrast, in 2008 Florida announced a goal of a 75% statewide diversion rate by the year 2020.
But any state or national drive to increase recycling ultimately starts with each person and family.
“My family switched to a 65-gallon bin early in 2010, with a goal of diverting 50% of our trash to recycling,” wrote Learnard. “We think twice before we throw anything into the trash. Little things, even junk mail, yogurt containers, soup cans, empty toilet paper rolls and glass jars and their lids, really add up. I can honestly tell you that after only three months, we are very close to a 50% recycling rate, achieved simply by changing our habits.”
Some of the Peachtree City waste haulers now offer covered, 65-gallon bins with the same footprint as the smaller, uncovered 18-gallon recycling bins.
The larger bins are on wheels for a much easier trip to the curb and are picked up once every two weeks.
Each hauler offers different services, so to shop around, here are the five approved waste haulers in Peachtree City:
ANS Sanitation, 770-599-1606
CLM Sanitation, 770-474-9273
Republic/Allied Waste EPI/Environmental Partners/Allsouth Robertson/BFI, 404-792-2660
Waste Industries/Cardinal Sanitation/Titan Sanitation, 770-969-0148
Waste Management, 404-794-6707
Peachtree City also operates recycling centers on Rockaway Road and McIntosh Trail. For more information call KPB at 770-632-3195 or visit their web site at www.peachtree-city.org/kptcb.
What is the best time to start recycling? Learnard’s advice: “How about now?”
