Orange County Solid Waste Management
In observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the solid waste convenience centers will be closed Monday. The landfill will be open its usual hours from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Curbside recycling will be collected as usual so have your bins out Monday by 7 a.m.
Garbage collection will vary from town to town. Residential waste in Carrboro and Hillsborough usually collected on Monday will be collected on Tuesday. Chapel Hill's Monday waste will be collected Wednesday.
Beginning Feb. 1, the Bradshaw Quarry Solid Waste Convenience Center will be open two days per week, reduced from four currently in response to budgetary constraints. The new schedule has the center open on Saturday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Tuesday 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. The other four convenience centers at Eubanks, Ferguson, High Rock and Walnut Grove Church roads will continue to operate on the current schedule of Monday, Tuesday and Friday from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.
While the county has not made any long-term decisions on the future of the solid waste convenience centers, it is certainly clear from the more than 430,000 visits to the sites last year and the general opinions of especially rural area residents that the convenience centers are highly valued and therefore likely to remain a part of the county solid waste management operations in the foreseeable future. The more pressing questions are how to pay for them and how they should be operated, designed and located.
Currently the solid waste operations at the centers are funded with county general fund tax revenues at more than $2.2 million per year. Should they continue to be completely tax-supported or should other sources of funding be considered is a key issue as well as future hours of operation, design and functions at each center. These issues as well as approaches to expanding rural recycling and potential county involvement in waste collection will become more critical in the next two to three years when all trash will be trucked long distances for disposal after Orange County's landfill is full in 2012.
A lot of analytical information and some options for the long-term future of convenience centers have been posted on the county web site at the solid waste page: http://www.co.orange.nc.us/recycling/workgroup.asp. The multi-jurisdictional Solid Waste Plan Work Group will continue its work on the county's long-term solid waste plan including recommendations specific to the convenience centers and other rural area issues.
A citizen from Carrboro called recently with two questions that may be of broader interest, so we reiterate them here:
1. I have some non-working, cheap lamps that are more than 50 percent metal. Should I put them out with the trash? They do not fit inside my trash roll cart.
No: if they don't fit in your roll cart, the regular solid waste collection truck will not pick them up and you will have to pay the town a separate bulky goods collection fee to have them picked up for disposal from the curb. Instead, if the lamps are mostly metal, bring them to a solid waste convenience center and put them in the scrap metal bin. The site attendant will render the final judgment about if the item is destined for trash or has enough metal content to be worth recycling.
2. I have some out of date medications and inhalers, what is the best way to dispose of them?
Bring them to the county's hazardous household waste program at the landfill, open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 7:30 a.m. to noon Saturday. If the inhalers are empty and made of metal, you may put them in your recycling bin along with other metal cans. Plastic prescription bottles are not recyclable; throw them out. If you cannot make it to the HHW site, you may safely dispose of the medication and the inhalers in the trash. Do not flush medication down the toilet or sink.
On Jan. 21 at 2:30 p.m., I will give a presentation to the Village Elders group and take questions at the Seymour Senior Center on Homestead Road in Chapel Hill on the future of solid waste management in Orange County.
On Jan. 25, at 7 p.m., locally based plastics recycling specialist Ms. Nina Bellucci-Butler will lead a free public discussion about solid waste recycling and what happens to materials after they enter your recycling bin as part of a new series called "Growing a Positive Future Together."
The meeting will be held at Extraordinary Ventures, 200 S. Elliott Road in Chapel Hill. This series of public education seminars is being conducted by the newly formed Transition Carrboro-Chapel Hill group (www.transitioncch.org). The discussion will be preceded by screening of a short documentary film "Point of Return" illustrating how recycling fits into a new, low carbon, sustainable economy.
