Blair L. Pollock

Orange County Solid Waste Management

Since we started recruiting bars and restaurants in downtown Chapel Hill onto the recycling bandwagon in 1992, getting all those businesses and their staffs on board and doing it right has been a challenge. A short 17 years later, getting it right remains daunting in the heart of Chapel Hill -- referring to the 100 block of East Franklin Street with its high density of businesses using mostly shared recycling sites.

Over the past month our intrepid staff has taken a door-to-door hard look at the triumphs and tragedies, failures and finesses of recycling downtown. Here's a peak into the Dumpster for you all:

Recycling for the 100 block is a back-door and alley affair. All six publicly collected sites serving the 50 or so businesses on the north side of that fabled block are scattered throughout the parking lots, parking decks and service alleys. Recycling carts are generally not next to the waste compactors, so all too often the compactors get recycling in them while waste ends up in recycling's realm.

Then there are the nuances -- recycling should never ever be in plastic bags, but for some bars and restaurants, that's the easiest way to take it out. The big No. 10 steel food cans that often have sauce in them and take up lots of space should ideally be flattened or at least rinsed. Cardboard boxes filled with five-gallon bottles of cooking oil can be recycled once the bottle is removed and that can be recycled with other bottles.

But plastic bags containing fountain syrup cannot be recycled with the bottles! Neither can those clear plastic cups with a No. 1 on the bottom! Some staff don't speak or read any English, so communicating with the night shift who takes out the trash is often a challenge. Then there are the derelicts who use the somewhat hidden recycling sites for all sorts of unsavory behavior -- that we'll leave to your imagination.

Some restaurants are already angry at the town for penalties incurred for leaving trash on the ground. Turns out when the staff thought the garbage compactor was full, all it really needed was someone to turn the switch to mechanically ram garbage into the box instead of letting it hang out. Solution -- dump and run? No more. The town can write tickets for trash left on the ground if the owner can be identified. Better solution: recycle more, waste less.

Helping to keep recycling quality up keeps revenues up and program costs down. That doesn't happen automatically. It needs constant reminding. And you thought your job was fun. Special thanks to our part-time staffer Neill Prewitt for taking this on.

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Orange County's planning for solid waste management in the unincorporated areas is ongoing. The Solid Waste Plan Work Group next considers making recommendations to the Board of Orange County Commissioners on how to keep the Bradshaw Quarry Road Convenience Center open for the remainder of the fiscal year -- through June 30, 2010; how and when to further expand rural curbside recycling service; how to finance, operate and design the Solid Waste Convenience Centers for best, safest most efficient operation. (They received more than 430,000 visits last year from Orange County residents.)

You can view the documents related to the planning session at the county Web page: www.co.orange.nc.us/recycling/solid waste plan work group or call us for a copy of the documents if you don't have computer access.

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Muriel Williman, our compost expert, reports a steadily increasing interest in compost demonstration workshops from all kinds of groups ranging from schools to churches and civic groups. If you want to know more about how to manage your organic wastes to turn them into rich dirt instead of garbage, give Muriel a call and she can point you in the right direction.

Muriel also wants to remind everyone that compost bins make great holiday gifts, and you can get one for $50 at our office at 1207 Eubanks Road during business hours, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Cash or check please, we're old school.

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We usually have a plea for you and this month it is this: If you are interested in helping to improve recycling in our community and speak one of several Asian languages including Chinese (various dialects), Japanese, Korean, Burmese or Karen, we could really use your help. We have a number of Spanish speakers on our temporary staff, but we are finding more non-English speaking members of the various Asian communities that we are trying to reach with the recycling message, especially in our door-to-door work with apartment complexes.