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recycling it. As previously alluded, often you have money set at the State level, <br />but often it does not go to the counties where it is needed. That is something we <br />can support and the County Council can lobby the State to ensure those funds <br />make it to the recycling program so they have the adequate money they need to <br />deal with things like glass. <br />7. Encourage oil recycling: If we could advocate to take the scale down to quarts, <br />instead of large gallon volumes, that helps to deal with oil recycling at a <br />consumer levels, not individual levels. We buy oil in quarts, not 55-gallon drums. <br />As it is now it’s geared to high end commercial consumers. That is something <br />they would like to change. <br />8. Electronic waste funds being allocated directly to the counties. About $250,000 <br />went to the island but only $100,000 went to the County because of the <br />stipulations in moving funds. There’s a whole back story to that, but it’s another <br />example where we can advocate to the Council that all the funds set aside <br />actually end up in the budgets for the County to do what they need to do to deal <br />with e-Waste. <br />Commissioner Burns said he would be happy to summarize those points or put them into <br />letters that the Commission can review. These are tangible directives we can take from their <br />advice to push forward that program. This is a valuable area we could spend time on, trying to <br />support them, and not focus on the lack of a budget but change the structuring to build <br />independent budgets within our County to maintain the projects in the long term. <br />Chair Adams recommended that Commissioner Burns come up with specific proposals, so we’ll <br />get it on the agenda, and have background information on priorities, and then we can address it <br />as a Commission. She said Commissioner Burns could go ahead and draft a letter and the <br />Commission can have a discussion around the letter. She hopes other commissioners might also <br />pull together a package and we can get it on an agenda, discuss a motion, write a letter, and get <br />it done. <br /> <br />Commissioner Burns said he would talk with SWD Chief Goodale and figure out a prioritized list. <br />He could start off with a letter and we could all weigh in with revisions, and push it forward. <br /> <br /> Commissioner Cardwell <br />o Support efforts on sustainable island-wide residential food waste composting: <br />i. Support identification of barriers and solutions with stakeholders. <br />ii. Pilot scalable, safe and cost-effective processes to collect and convert <br />food waste and distribute valuable compost to users. <br />While Commissioner Cardwell did not have new information to report, she wanted to reiterate <br />that one of the barriers to composting is the permitting process, and the other piece that <br />wasn’t mentioned in the March meeting was that there has been an argument about harvesting <br />methane from landfills. If we continue to put organics in the landfill we could harvest the <br />methane. She wanted to oppose that idea because it makes more sense to use composting <br />material for compost and not for methane, especially when energy sources like solar and wind <br />power are so cheap that it doesn’t make sense to harvest the methane. <br />6 <br /> <br /> <br />