Each speaker is suggested to take about 3 minutes.
This meeting's agenda includes a discussion of the third chapter in the Solid Waste Management Master Plan. The chapter deals with recycling efforts. This meeting and the next will look at what is current happening and what new opportunities might be worth exploring for future efforts to reduce the waste going to the incinerator.
Jeff Bickford, staff for Marion County Environmental Services that oversees SWMAC, said that the county has purchased a larger magnet that is designed to help pick up more ferris metals from the waste. This new magnet will hopefully pay for itself in about 6 months due to the high value of metals in the recycling business.
The consultant for Marion County suggested at the last meeting that from 25 to 50 percent more materials could be reclaimed or recycled from the waste stream. This included paper, metals, non-organic and organic materials.
It was suggested that it would be a good issue for someone to study the economics of pulling these materials for recycling.
2 comments:
On September 22, 2008 Marion County held a public workshop about the 5-Year planning process that discussed possible new technologies for waste disposal.
About 25 people from the public attended the meeting along with 13 members of the Solid Waste Management Advisory Committee (SWMAC). The majority of the presentation was made by JE Miller Associates, that was contacted by Marion County to conduct the review process.
The first session was an overview of the process. The second session was a review of new technologies for waste burning.
The sessions were highly technical in nature and many of the people who had come to give input left before the presentation was over. It was a complete disappointment to me and I felt that Marion County had left a poor impression. They missed a real opportunity to engage the public in a dialog about waste prevention, recycling and what to do with our municipal waste.
There was little or no information on how to reduce waste in the first place, or how to find low cost ways of decreasing waste.
It is my hope that the County will learn from this poor beginning and try again to get citizen input into waste management issues. After all we create the waste, so we need to be part of the solution finding.
Waste-CAN
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