Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 2, 1994 TAG: 9404040174
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
Thursday night, nine of the New River Valley's experts on solid waste gathered to discuss local aspects of the modern-day mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle.
With state law dictating recycling goals and federal law making it more costly to bury trash in landfills, businesses and governments everywhere are looking for ways to cut down on the so-called "waste stream."
The big issue regionally is a possible agreement, now the subject of negotiation, that would commit Blacksburg, Christiansburg, the unincorporated areas of Montgomery County and Virginia Tech into a regional recycling center at the Mid-County Landfill.
That $2 million project is scheduled for a September 1995 opening, depending on how the negotiations proceed, explained Randall Bowling, Montgomery's public facilities director.
Meanwhile, the towns, Tech and the county are each working on a broad range of initiatives to recycle everything from the usual suspects - cans, bottles and newspapers - to some of the new ones: old clothes, refrigerators and bald tires.
One of the region's newest recycling tools, a mobile tire shredder, is set to go to work for the first time Monday at the Montgomery landfill. Pat Therrien, manager of the Appalachian Regional Recycling Commission, said tires will be reduced to "rough, primary shred" in the first stage of the project. Paid for by the state Department of Environment Quality, the shredder will produce chips suitable for erosion control and backfill.
In the second stage of the project, set for this summer, a more advanced machine will shred tires into 2-inch chips that will be more marketable. Some may be used as backfill in the Huckleberry Trail project.
Tires are traditionally the bane of landfill managers' existence, because they work their way back to the surface after burial. The shredder eliminates that problem and, if it does prove profitable, could also encourage people to not dump used tires in illegal roadside dumps.
The recycling forum, sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, drew only 40 people, but raised a host of interesting issues and facts, among them:
Recycling pays, but isn't profitable yet. Tim Myers, Montgomery's recycling coordinator, said the goal is to have recycling cover its costs, which are now supplemented slightly by landfill tipping fees. All of the materials collected by the county do return some revenue, Myers said. The challenge is that the revenues generally cover transportation but not handling costs. Still, after revenues the overall cost of recycling is less than that of disposal in the landfill. The downside is that contamination of recyclables, such as the wrong types of plastics mixed together, can increase costs and defeat the purpose of recycling.
What department at Virginia Tech generates the most waste paper for recycling? Larry Bechtel, Tech's recycling coordinator, admitted the obvious: Burruss Hall, the hub of the academic bureaucracy.
Most of the major industries in Montgomery have developed in-house recycling programs, Bowling said. The Corning plant, for instance, has reduced the amount of waste ceramic material going to the landfill by two-thirds since 1990, he said.
Therrien said it's easy for people to criticize industry for not pulling its weight when it comes to recycling. But the better approach is to encourage companies for what they're already doing, and help them overcome hurdles to do more, she said.
by CNB