Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 9, 2010
Community program educates on “recycling right”
Erica Tuggle
Orange Grove Center workers sort through over 1.5 million pounds of recyclable material that comes to the John F. Germ recycling center each month. Curbside recycling center services, convenience center locations throughout town and the “Recycle Right” education program have all led to increases in recycling and decreases in residue material. Their goal now is to eliminate plastic bags from coming through the centers as these products cannot be recycled.
- Erica Tuggle
One glass baby food container, if not recycled, will stay in a landfill for over 500 years without decomposition. Multiply that by the several containers of food a single baby can go through, and then imagine these containers from all the babies in the country. It quickly adds up to a serious problem.
Recycling materials can provide new products and less residue pile-up, but must be done right or it can be as bad as not recycling at all. Chattanooga’s efforts in education for recycling has significantly improved over the years with the implementation of “Recycle Right,” a partnership between the city and the Orange Grove Center.
Orange Grove has been providing curbside recycling to the city for 20 years, but through the Recycle Right program the effort has expanded in an increased number of convenience centers for recycling drop-off, education opportunities for schools and express routes that serve local companies.
Tera Roberts, the director of adult services for Orange Grove, says, “Before we formed Recycle Right, almost four years ago, things were getting pretty bad. We realized we needed more education for citizens to teach them what to put in recycling.”
The problem was residue items like old tennis shoes, plastic bags and Styrofoam were appearing in the collected materials, participation was down and something needed to be done, she says. Orange Grove had meetings with public works and the city and decided that recycling needed to be viable in Chattanooga, and was worth putting money and education efforts in it
With the national green initiative to help things along, now approximately two million pounds of recyclable products come through the center each month, residue has greatly decreased and the sell of good, clean recyclable products has increased, she says. A key factor for the success is education spreading the word about sustainability. They maintain this with field trip opportunities to the John F. Germ Recycling Center where an interactive exhibit is located. Roberts says they have also tried several pilot recycling programs in local high schools. The Recycle Right mascot, Rocky the raccoon, makes trips to areas of high people volume like Riverbend and Coolidge Park, too.
The materials that arrive at the Germ Recycling Center also serve the community in providing jobs for Orange Grove clients that sort all the materials that come in by hand.
Roberts says, “It has been excellent opportunity to partner with the city, because even in this sheltered environment [clients] are given real work life experiences.”
Roberts says this is one of their most exciting day programs at the center as all 80 clients that work with the program, from operating the heavy equipment, sorting, or out on the truck route, are all from Orange Grove community.
“It’s been a great experience for [clients] and if you talk to them they say they will never leave,” she says. “It’s a good social network for them to have fun with friends too; some place they have all come to love.”
Misti Gipson, the operations coordinator, encourages locals to get more involved by family recycling participation, visiting the convenience centers and interacting with the clients they see at these centers. Gipson encourages bringing materials to the centers because of the jobs they provide for clients.
A new program that businesses can get in on to provide jobs for clients and recycle all their sensitive documents is the document destruction program. Roberts says this program began in October 2009, and already has 60 customers. This program opened up grants and subsidies for them in this process, and allowed them to set up a secure area for the destruction of documents that is monitored with video feed. She says she wants to serve any individual citizen or business that has an interest.
In the end, the recycling effort is about helping the community in the two fold area of jobs and clean-up.
“Orange Grove’s mission is to provide meaningful work and training opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities,” she says. “We don’t set out to be the lead in recycling in Chattanooga, but when we find a good niche for our clients we want to do it well.”
Richard Beeland, the Media Relations Director for Mayor Littlefield’s office, says recycling is important to the city because it keeps things out of the landfills that fill up very fast.
“The more we can keep out of them, the more responsible use of the land we have and create a recyclable stream of things that can be turned into usable items again,” he says.
Some people wonder why certain items are not accepted in the program, and Beeland says it’s because there is no market for these items, and to take them actually costs money for the city.
“Although we do take glass, there is not a market for that. We are taking a lot of things and diverting them from the landfill, but it is at a cost to us to continue to do,” he says.
This could develop into an issue later with the budget cuts that all municipalities are going through that make it hard to maintain the level of recycling service provided, he says.
“We are doing everything we can to continue the program…there may come a time when the city council decides to make cuts and that may be a program they decide to cut. That would be very unfortunate because it does have an impact on the city and the avenue we have opened for citizens to recycle. But we can only do so with the proper levels of funding,” he says.
Beeland says everyone who wants to help keep the program in place can sign up for curbside recycling by calling 311 or visiting www.recycleright.org where there is also the directions, materials accepted and hours of the five local convenience centers.
“Recycling is just a matter of being a responsible citizen,” he says. “Anyone can do it, and everyone should. The more people who participate in recycling, the more we can justify in continuing it.”
|
|