Recycling

It's occurred to me recently that, to the outside world, the topics we engage with on the County Board might seem pretty humdrum and trivial. The fact that the change in the hiring approval process, noted below, was such a big deal, probably comes as a surprise. Another issue that many of you might not think about all that much, an issue we discuss every month at SWEC, is recycling.

The County is statutorily responsible for recycling – as far as I know, another unfunded mandate – but we've been doing it a long time and we can get pretty enthused, in our monthly discussions, about the variety of items that can be recycled and how we go about doing that. Here are just some examples:

MATTRESSES: As you can imagine, a discarded mattress (usually accompanied by its boxspring) can take up a lot of room in a landfill. Consider that Otsego County has two colleges, two hospitals, and a very robust tourist industry, we generate a lot of mattresses that need to be disposed of (and boxsprings too, of course).

Triad is a recycling and energy company in the western part of the state, and it recycles mattresses. What this means is that they employ people to manually deconstruct each mattress and boxspring, and separate all the component parts for re-use. Steel, polyurethane foam, wood and fabrics are processed for reuse. They've got a trailer at the Southern Transfer Station in Oneonta; we fill it up, and they take it away. We charge $25/mattress, and pretty much break even; no mattress goes to a landfill. Learn more at their website.

AG PLASTIC: You've seen those white plastic-wrapped haystacks, ranked by the dozens, on the edges of fields, and the long bays of plastic-covered silage in horizontal silos adjacent to larger working farms in our County. Tons and tons of that plastic is used each year, and it's all trash when the feed is unwrapped and fed to the cows. In conjunction with Jordan Clements and the Otsego County Soil & Water District, we hold two ag plastic recycling days a year. Farmers bring us the plastic, we use a dedicated baler designed for just that, load the bales on a tractor-trailer, and ship it out. The bales take a long, circuitous route halfway around the world, and return to us as plastic grocery bags (more of that below). For about 40,000 pounds of trucked-in bales, we get about enough money to pay for the trucking.

PLASTIC GROCERY BAGS: If you're keeping up with this kind of thing, you'll know that there are initiatives all over the country to get a grip on the plastic grocery bag problem. They're ubiquitous, getting into every conceivable wastestream and littering our landscape more and more every year (and threatening many kinds of wildlife in the bargain). Some municipalities have banned them outright; others have imposed a five-cent fee for each one you use. New York City is working on a fee; some Legislators in Albany are looking at a plan to provide a three-cent sales tax credit for each reusable bag a customer brings in and fills with groceries.

There is, however, a way for each of us to address this right now. State law requires that larger stores that use plastic grocery bags provide a place for customers to return them for recycling. As it turns out, these bag recycling bins accept most 'thin film' products, including bread bags, those bags you use for your veggies in the produce department, drycleaning bags, ziploc bags, plastic cereal box liners, Tyvek, bubble wrap (you need to pop the bubbles – what a great excuse to have fun!) and most other thin-film plastic product wrap. There are bins in Oneonta in Hannaford, Price Chopper, Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe's, for a start. So – something we can all do about all this plastic.

OCCA's EARTH FESTIVAL: April 22, at Milford Central School. I have to admit that the first time I went, when I first joined the Board, it was because I kind of thought I should. What a great day it turned out to be! I spent hours learning and talking and listening and looking at fascinating presentations. I also got rid of all the styrofoam I had been hoarding in the hope of finding someplace to recycle it.

So don't miss it. I hope to see you there, right after I drop off all the styrofoam (actually, expanded polystyrene) I've been collecting since the last one. Learn a whole lot more.