City recycling program adds to trash
By KEN MIDKIFF
Published Friday, May 2, 2008
(http://archive.columbiatribune.com/2008/may/20080502comm001.asp)
Who’d a thunk it?

Akin to about everybody else, when the "bottle deposit" ordinance was voted down and we switched to the "blue bag" system, I assumed that the blue bags would be recycled. After all, that’s what we place all of our recyclable plastic and cans in, so it stands to reason that the blue bags containing all this stuff would be recycled.

Right? Wrong.
As reported in this newspaper, those blue bags end up as so much trash and presumably get tossed into the city’s landfill. Apparently, the bags are not the right type of plastic or are too thin or something that prevents reuse or recycling.

This is not a small problem. On my cul-de-sac, everyone puts out their blue bags, along with paper grocery sacks, to be picked up by the recycling truck. Multiply that by the number of folks who place their blue bags out by the curb, and each week there is an astounding number of blue bags ending up as trash. Given that there are about 35,000 households in Columbia, and given that most households participate in the recycling program, it means there are about that many blue bags.

That’s a lot of stuff filling up our landfill, not to mention that none of the blue bags will be reused or recycled. So not only does our landfill get used up sooner than it would otherwise, but the city is creating a mountain of trash because the city provides the bags as a public service.
The Public Works Department and the Columbia City Council are aware of the problem, and options have been proposed. So far, all of the options have been rejected. The most promising was to replace the blue bags with bins, but those were deemed to be too heavy for sanitation workers to lift, would slow down pickup considerably and would be subjected to theft.

The problem is that the city has set up a system that is difficult to change. The pickup trucks are not equipped to handle bins. In other areas, the bins are on rollers, are large and have handles that the truck can engage to dump the contents of the bin into the truck. Columbia’s trucks are not so equipped, and even if they were, the large bins are definitely overkill for recycling purposes. The solution, then, is elusive, because we are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Until someone manages to come up with something better, we will keep filling our landfill with non-recyclable trash - trash that is used to promote a system of recycling. This makes no sense.

Fortunately for those of us who have vehicles and are willing to expend a bit of time and effort, there is a solution. We can haul our recyclable materials to those "commingled" dumpsters situated around town, using the blue bags as handy containers. Just dump the contents of the blue bag in the dumpster and reuse the bag.

Unfortunately, there are many people in this town who do not have vehicles or do not have the time to expend in hauling plastic, bottles and cans to dumpsters. So far, all we have is a problem in search of a solution.

OOPS
Last Friday, in a column on CAFOs and KOMU, I made a somewhat amateurish error: I relied on outdated, possibly false information. You might think that someone who has been writing a column for 14 years would be immune to such mistakes, but I am not. I should have checked the accuracy of the sources, and I didn’t.

As it turns out, the Chinns don’t raise hogs for Cargill. Instead, they are independent producers, selling their animals to Premium Standard Foods in Milan. So, all the fingers I pointed at the Chinns don’t apply. They’re not hog janitors but hog raisers. I apologize for mischaracterizing them.

Interestingly, it seems that the only independent producers from which Premium Standard Foods owned by Premium Standard Farms (PSF), which is in turn owned by Smithfield buys hogs turns out to be the Chinns. Although some folks around Milan say that the Chinns must use PSF genetic stock and must adhere to PSF’s ways of raising hogs, I could not document that, and at this point it remains only a rumor.
I was, however, absolutely right about other matters, including that the number of hogs raised in this state is about half of what it was in 1970 and that the number of farmers raising hogs has shrunk from more than 50,000 in 1970 to about 1,900 today. Most of those 1,900 growers raise hogs for an agribusiness corporation.

It is also interesting that in an e-mail from Chris Chinn, she continues to confuse agriculture (a way of life) with agribusiness (a way of business). Although I was wrong about the association with Cargill, I was right about the Chinns engaging in agribusiness.

Finally, it was not the Chinns who were the target of my column - it was KOMU-TV. The reporter had to look long and hard to find an independent producer of hogs, and ultimately a happy face was painted on an ugly subject.