It is with heavy heart that I tell my Indianapolis friends that the Board of Public Works approved the bad deal with Covanta to collect trash and recyclables together in the name of contaminated recycling. No amount of information, clarification or citizen input (and they received over a thousand letters and signatures) seemed to matter as their minds were made up. A Mayor and board nuzzled up with a private sector company who will make/take millions of our tax dollars in this contract that runs til 2028, with $4M a year penalties if the City wants to expand or change our recycling program, and many other incentives to simply throw trash in a bin. The City didnt have the courage or wherewithal to look at our trash comprehensively. They wanted to keep hidden the true cost of trash collection and disposal, and point to an inefficient recycling program that they created of their own doing -- one that is subscription based, without with no ties to the trash, nor any incentive for reducing trash generation, benefits from no economies of scale because it is without any education whatsoever. One brave Board member, Gregory Garrett, questioned the logic while the others were either too politically connected or ill-informed to question it. One board member said that recycling advocates should be celebrating that we are forcing anti-recyclers to recycling through their trash with their contract - that recycling advocates got one over on the anti-recyclers. Another makes recycling seem only like a warm and fuzzy thing that wealthy, privileged people like herself can do for their children. No amount of information from those industries that rely on those recyclables mattered -- industries that make our sacks and boxes and copy paper and toilet paper out of recycled paper; those that make glass containers and reduce their energy costs by 85% when using recycled glass over virgin sand and silica; those who manufacture bottles and lumber and carpet and polar fleece out of plastic bottles; and cars and office equipment and cans and bottles out of our aluminum and steel cans. Real jobs in Indiana - thousands of them that rely on recycled material. In fact, though recycling relies very heavily on the quantity of material collected, it relies more importantly on the quality of that material. We could be growing a recycling industry here in Indianapolis. Instead, we are going with the same technology weve used since 1988 - burn it for steam, and pretending that some, minimal levels of recycling might be attempted along the way. Outdated, backwards, short-sighted. Big win for Covanta. Big loss for the tax payers and citizens of Indianapolis. Thanks for your efforts Indiana Recycling Coalition, Hoosier Environmental Council, Citizens Action Coalition, Earth Charter Indiana, and all the others who put their heart and soul into trying to help Indy make the right decision.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 20:22:07 +0000