EVERETT, Wash. — Out here next to Steamboat Slough
and the lumber mill, piles of garbage from Seattle are lined up in neat rows
and blanketed with a fabric similar to that used in high-end Gore-Tex clothing.
What goes in as yard waste and food scraps will
emerge two months later as a mountain of loamy compost sold by the bag at
garden centers throughout the Pacific Northwest by Cedar Grove Composting. In
the process, the waste is ground up, piled up, aerated, dried and sifted. The
space-age fabric covering the piles allows air to enter but keeps pungent odors
from wafting over the countryside.
“This is the cool side of trash,” Cedar Grove’s
founder, Steve Banchero, said of the process, which is on recycling’s cutting
edge.
The company, the major composter in this area, will
soon have much more trash coming its way because Seattle is making food waste
yet another mandatory recycling ingredient in its already long list.
“The food-waste issue is the new frontier for
recycling advocates,” said Kate Krebs, the executive director of the National
Recycling Coalition. “It’s the next big chunk.”
Seattle now recycles 44 percent of its trash,
compared with the national average of around 30 percent, which makes it a major
player in big-city waste recovery. Its goal, city waste management officials
said, is to reach 60 percent by 2012 and 72 percent by 2025.
In many other parts of the country, recycling is in
the doldrums — and in some cases backsliding — despite the sounding of
environmental alarms about global
warming and shrinking resources. And it is a far cry from
recycling’s heyday, after the nation was jarred into action in 1987 by images
of a barge carrying garbage from Long Island being towed up and down the East
Coast in search of a place to unload. Six months later, its cargo was returned
to New York and burned in a Brooklyn incinerator.
The wandering barge had a profound effect on the
American psyche, and within three years most states had passed laws requiring
some kind of recycling. But recycling victories are now gauged in much smaller
increments. In Seattle’s case, the latest success is measured in scraps.
As the law now stands in Seattle, residents of
single family houses are allowed to mix food scraps with yard waste, which is
then shipped off to be composted. Recycling of food scraps will become
mandatory in 2009.
The new law may add yet another container for
curbside pickup, which already includes receptacles for nonrecyclable trash,
yard waste, glass and other recyclables. In Seattle, many residents take pride
that their weekly nonrecyclable output fits in a container no larger than the
average countertop microwave.
But like other cities, Seattle also found itself in
a recycling skid a few years back, losing ground to apathy despite being a
pacesetter in the boom years of the late ’80s.
“We hit a cardboard ceiling,” said Tim Croll of the
Seattle Public Utilities.
The city’s response was to ban paper and cardboard
from nonrecyclable garbage — with enforcement penalties — followed by allowing
food scraps to be mingled with yard waste.
Still, Seattle’s progress on the home front
addresses only part of the challenge of use and reuse. Commercial recycling is
in its infancy, though programs have been going for some time — and with
considerable success — in places like the San Francisco Bay Area.
The larger picture is that the West Coast is a
recycling bellwether, given the emphasis placed on it in Washington, Oregon and
California. That includes legislation in California that requires 50 percent of
waste statewide to be recycled.
“People are just a little greener on the West Coast,”
Mr. Croll said.
Read rest of the article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/us/10recycle.html?ref=recyclingofwastematerials
- Khadija Al Mousa
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