21-04-28 EMC minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

support the people being at all the transfer stations, but by raising the fees, nobody likes that, nobody wants to see the fees raised, but that gives them the opportunity to have an internal managed budget where they can honor that more effectively. 2. Creating diversion programs: This is something we could support. Certain transfer stations would have dedicated days for greenwaste only, and that way all the greenwaste that comes that day cannot contaminate the other waste bins and cannot end up in the landfill. Small things that seemsimple but need a lot of support. That can ruffle feathers because on a diversion day people might not want to bring greenwaste on a Thursday; they might want to bring on a Wednesday. It won’t be a “one size fits all,”but it’s a reasonable approach to try to eliminate contaminating waste bins. 3. Expanded producer responsibility programs: These are ways for consumer items to collect a fee up front, and then can deal with the disposal and management of that. One area Mr. Hayducsko is working on now is fees for stores that sell paint. The stores are supportive of it. Fees would be built into the paint you purchase, and would help with the paint disposal. Fees would go to county recycling, not to the business, and then have the business tasked with recycling the item. As we have seen with tires, the tire recycling program doesn’t work perfectly, and the surplus of funds for tire recycling stays with the private company. We need those funds to stay within the Recycling budget so they have the capacity to deal with the management and respond to public input. 4. Standardized waste management plans: As an example with plastic bags, this can be a big success. The problem can be when each County adopts a unique structure of the rules, and that can catch people off-guard. For a business like Safeway, which serves all counties, it can be difficult to comply with differing ordinances. One thing we can support is a standardized plan, which makes it easier for businesses to comply. The easier you make it to comply with rules, the more people and business will do it. It’s a positive consideration to take into account. 5. Encouraging life cycle assessments: This is to encourage the County and the Council to allocate funds for life cycle assessments for a lot of these recycling programs. Hi-5 programs, for example, have a lifespan. For a lot of the items we recycle the cost and requirements to deal with it will change in 5 and 10 years. It would be a positive movement to do more life cycle assessments. We saw the outcry over the loss of the contract for recycling, but the reality of it, and we need better education, is you just cannot do the recycling as done on the mainland when you are isolated on a small island. And you burn an enormous amount of resources moving those recyclables away. We need to develop creative strategies that work for here. They are not going to be the same for everywhere. 6. Increase the Hi-5 glass recycling fee: Right now the State funds going to glass don’t actually go to our County. We’re running out of money to deal with glass and that can be a low-hanging fruit. Because we know the mechanisms of 5