MORE ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS THROUGH RECYCLING

Last month’s article was about the positive impact on our environment that your efforts through our City and County’s recycling programs has generated. The numbers used in that article were based on the number of tons of recyclables shipped out from the Recycling Center for the year 2006 and were generated by using two different Environmental Benefits Calculators developed and/or funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Last year I did a series of articles on the Georgia Department of Community Affairs’ Waste Characterization Study detailing the makeup of the waste going into our landfill. If you will remember, the Study showed that we are landfilling thousands of tons of good recyclable materials. I thought it might be interesting to plug those numbers into both of the Environmental Benefits Calculators. In other words, I wanted to see just how much energy could have been saved and how much air emissions could have been reduced if all of those tons were diverted into a recycling program instead of being sent to the landfill. My previous articles pointed out how much potential revenue was being lost by trashing recyclables so now let’s see what other benefits are being missed out on.

Instead of the 80,489 BTU’s per year saved, we would have saved 711,742 BTU’s. This new number now represents the amount of energy saved in 3,700 households for a year as opposed to only 426 households. We would have saved 122,714 barrels of oil and 5,737,655 gallons of gasoline per year by not sending those tons to the landfill as opposed to the 13,877 barrels of oil and 648,857 gallons of gasoline saved last year. The most startling number, in my opinion, is that the reduction equivalent in passenger cars off the road for a year jumps from 2,523 to 19,051. Other air emissions, which include carbon dioxide, methane gas, ammonia, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, would be reduced by almost 25,000 tons per year instead of just 5,600 tons without the landfilled recyclables.

Once again I present these numbers to try to encourage more recycling participation throughout the City and County. We are a community so fortunate to have so many recycling opportunities – at the Curb in the City, at 6 different County remote sites, Walker Mountain Landfill and the Recycling Center – and need more people to use them to help us reduce the amount of recyclables going into our landfill. I want to again thank those of you who are doing your part and let you know how much your efforts benefit the community as a whole. Keep up the good work. Please visit our web site for more details on all the recycling programs and maps to the County sites and the landfill www.romefloydrecycles.org.