Comments on: New Recycle Program Could Be Costly

By: dog

dog — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:29:17 +0000

What bothers me about how decisions are made down at city hall is they treat us like children on a need to know basis.
A good example is the glass recycling program. In the beginning, they had us sorting the glass by color with no intention of ever recycling it. All the glass goes in some pit somewhere.
Why can’t they just be honest?

By: slim jim

slim jim — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:25:31 +0000

Well, like everything else that has been going on the people who make the laws and pass rules for us are quite unable to look ahead and see the various sides of the issues they look at and the various outcomes of the the rules they enact. And this is certainly one of them. It is as if they have no attention span.

In Oregon they pay a deposit on soda pop cans and bottles to encourage people to bring them back to get their deposit back. Always felt that was a good idea. If they don’t return them, if a tourist fails to do that, then there is money for others to pick up.

By: dog

dog — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:37:21 +0000

So is it OK to mail back junk mail to the sender if it has a pre-paid envelope in it? I’m just sending the suff back to the place it came from since I didn’t request it. Takes abut the same time as sorting the stuff. Some of those envelopes get pretty fat. Hope they recycle it.

By: JIMV

JIMV — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:41:02 +0000

“I live in a pretty decent sized Ada County (drum roll please) planned community and seeing all the blue bins sitting around the day before and after trash day is both unsightly and can lead to debris blown all about littering up our streets and common areas.”

I leave my trash cans on the sidewalk on purpose. If I do not my peasant neighbors will, park ON my sidewalk, block my driveway, or worst of all, actually park on my lawn damaging the sprinkler system. If I leave a big obstacle or so on the sidewalk, they avoid it and park on someone else’s lawn.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:58:27 +0000

No, but I’d have enough for a shot of bourbon (out of a glass bottle) at the local bar.

Hey, tastes change over time. 🙂

P.S. Movie in Emmett is still $2.50 for us old fogies, and I think $3 or so for everybody else.

By: Clancy

Clancy — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 03:45:41 +0000

Why I don’t mind sorting, I think this single stream solution will be beneficial to Boise and Ada County. This new program will encourage recycling from more homes, thus saving landfill space.

Waste Management,Inc. operates MRF-Materials recovery facilities that automatically sort the single stream recycling. A facility like this could be done with a private/public partnership.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_recovery_facility

http://www.springfieldmrf.org/Recycling_FAQs.html Waste Management, Inc. MRF

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls_Y7cadISc

By: Gordon

Gordon — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:44:17 +0000

Paul
When I was a kid in Arizona, we lived about 4 miles from the nearest town with a movie theater. So the other kids and I would walk the 4 miles, picking up bottles along the way (amazing how many people would throw them out of cars when they were worth 5 cents each — the price of a candy bar or half the price of a comic book). Usually, by the time we got to town, we had enough to cash in and go to the movie. Theaters then had couches and living-room-type chairs for people to sit in while waiting for the next movie, or waiting for their kids to come out of one. We’d slip our hands down behind the cushions, and usually come up with enough coins to get some popcorn and maybe candy or a Coke.
Result: We had a good walk, got to see a movie and eat some junk, and nearly every bottle got recycled (cuz I’m sure other kids — and probably some adults — also cleaned up along the roads).

EDITOR NOTE–Gordon, you obviously haven’t been to a Boise movie theater lately! With the price of aluminum , even if you filled your F-150 with cans, you wouldn’t have enough for popcorn, drink, and candy.

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 03:05:47 +0000

Gordon.. you have hit the nail on the head.

Back in the day we had to return beer and pop bottles to the store for a refund of the bottle deposit. I made over $40 in one afternoon in 1959 taking one lady’s bottles back to the grocery store. That was big bucks to a 13 year old kid scrounging for money.

Lazy people in my neighborhood would let them pile up and I would offer to haul the bottles back to the store for half the deposit money.

No gevernment involved. I am not sure why the returnable pop and beer bottles went away. Ditto with milk bottles.

By: Antiphobe

Antiphobe — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 23:34:37 +0000

I actually did some honest-to-gosh research (I know…what a cheater) on this topic myself about a month ago when I got wind that Team Dave was converting Boise city recycling over to a “single stream” process.
I was primarily interested due to three reasons:
1. Moving here from Scottsdale, AZ (yes..hate me all you want I’m not going back) I was somewhat taken aback by what I perceived to be a cumbersome and user un-friendly recycle sorting process.
2. The process took away some of my motivation for wanting to recycle.
3. I live in a pretty decent sized Ada County (drum roll please) planned community and seeing all the blue bins sitting around the day before and after trash day is both unsightly and can lead to debris blown all about littering up our streets and common areas. I thought my simple minded self “hey what is good for the Boise City goose ought to be good for the Ada County gander…why can’t we get single source recycling here”?
What I found out (or at least what I was told by what seemed to be pretty sharp Allied Waste representative)was that single stream recycling penciled out at the same cost for two reasons:
1. Under the bin/sorting philosophy not everyone follows the guidelines as meticulously as does our friend ericn1300. Therefore there is still a lot of manual re-sorting and verification required.
2. By utilizing a big blue roll-away bin (same size as the trash bins) the pick-up requirements can drop to every other week not every week thereby saving significant operating costs.
I was told that somewhere in the region (forget the exact location) there now existed a fancy schmancy sorting and recycling machine that would accommodate mixed/baled product trucked in from this area. It all made sense to me and I was considering (never got around to it yet) writing the County Commissioners to ask that single source be considered when they rebid the contract which I believe will happen within the next few months.

Sharon Ullman…are you out there and can you give us your insights?

By: Gordon

Gordon — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 09:21:47 +0000

Duh! How about enabling us to buy stuff without a ton of plastic waste enclosing everything (and sometimes requiring a machete to open it).
Buy drinks in glass bottles with a deposit on them (as we did years ago); take them back to the store and get the deposit back. The trucks that deliver the full bottles (pop, beer, milk, whatever) haul the empties back to the bottler for reuse (instead of driving back empty).
OK, that leaves tin cans and paper (newspapers, catalogs, magazines). Recycle them (easy to sort at home, or by magnet at the separator sites), and paper products. Yep, maybe still some negative financial impact there, but not as much, anyway.