By Dan Tortorice
Most Americans support the common-sense idea of recycling our waste, as opposed to burning or landfilling. But the recycling industry is facing hard times chiefly due to extremely low prices for oil. These lower commodity prices make recycled material less attractive to manufacturers. In Wisconsin we face an even greater hurdle with members of the state legislature who are hostile to the whole idea of recycling.
Madison is currently recycling about 57 percent of our waste stream. The leaders in this field — cities like Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and San Francisco, California — divert 75 percent or more.
Madison’s new recycling coordinator is Bryan Johnson, who replaces George Dreckman. Johnson is setting some realistic goals to continue growing the program. He wants to extend the collection of organic waste, mostly food garbage, from the current 1,000 families to 1,600. He also is looking to restart the recycling of old mattresses. These mattresses contain a lot of volume that is currently sent to the landfill. The problem with mattresses is a lack of efficient technology to break them down.
The city sends over 49,000 tons of waste to the Dane County Landfill each year, just under 1,500 pounds for each family. We pay the county approximately $1.4 million each year in dumping fees. It costs over $500 million to haul this waste.
The city has a contract with Pellitteri Waste Systems, a local company, to sort waste for recycling. If you want to see how the sorting works, they have an excellent video that shows each step in the process. You can access this video through the municipal website at cityofmadison.com/streets.
Like so many of the environmental problems we face, the voluntary actions of individuals and families can have a huge positive impact. Some easy things — such as not wasting food — can reduce the need for organic recycling. It is estimated that Americans waste about 40 percent of our food. We Northsiders tend to have large yards, which makes composting easy. All you need is a pile of leaves and a shovel to stir in your non-meat garbage.
Loose plastic bags present a huge and expensive problem for recycling machinery. It’s very important to place your plastic bags into one bag, press it down to about the size of a basketball and tie the top. Stray bags clog the sorting machines, which then have to be shut down to remove them. We should all be taking reusable bags to the grocery store for every trip. The smaller bags for vegetables can be placed inside the big bags and reused. We all need to make this effort now, since the Wisconsin Legislature has made it illegal for municipalities to ban plastic bags.
Another simple tip is to leave the caps on plastic jugs — just collapse the jug and screw on the top before recycling. Beer and pop bottle caps can also be recycled. Put them into a steel can and crush the top closed so they can’t fall out.
Madison Waste Watchers is a good source of information offered through the city’s website. If each Madison resident could reduce their waste by just 1 pound per week, we could reduce our output by 12 percent, or almost 6,000 tons. The Madison Streets Department also has a waste app for your phone with answers to your questions about waste and waste collection.