Recycling

The funeral director was discussing cremation with the bereaved family. When she told them that their father's artificial joint would be removed from the ashes and sent to a facility where the metal would be recycled, the mood brightened. "Dad was all about recycling," the mourners told Maryeileen Appio, manager of the Kirk & Nice funeral home in Plymouth Meeting. Appio recalled their saying, "He'd be thrilled that one of the last things he could do was have some parts recycled.

Just downstream from an industrial recycling operation and a stone's throw from a sewage treatment plant, a fisherman casts his line toward the passing barge traffic and watches it drop into the Delaware River. A couple eating lunch watch curiously. "No way would I ever eat anything from there," the woman says. The fishers who frequent the pier in Camden's Waterfront South neighborhood have heard it all before. That they're crazy, that they're going to grow an extra head or get sick from eating what they catch.

Mayor Goode took the sensible option yesterday, when he signed City Council's mandatory trash recycling bill. He did it in spite of inflated figures of just how much the local trash stream will be reduced by recycling, as well as concerns about program management and specific roles to be played by city and private haulers. But Council is still a day late and a trash-to-steam plant short when it comes to real solutions for Philadelphia's trash crisis. Recycling is important, but it's only a supplemental measure - part of an overall plan that Council lacks the nerve or the good sense to fully implement.

WITH ALL the talk about the impending demolition of Veterans Stadium, I wonder if anyone in City Hall is asking if the Vet could be more of an asset than a liability? You have to assume that if the powers that be figure the Vet has to go, then this means they consider this immense facility a liability. Or was it simply taken for granted that if we built two new stadiums, the "old" one had to go? Recycling, as a philosophy, doesn't apply just to soda bottles, even on this scale.

To the municipal melodrama over building a giant trash plant at the Navy Shipyard, add this quiet, but insistent subplot: There are some people in this city who would like to see Philadelphia doing a whole lot more about refuse recyling - a purported, but meagerly supported, project of the Goode administration. One is City Councilman Edward A. Schwartz, who two weeks ago lambasted the mayor for giving recycling short shrift. Even if a trash plant is approved - and so far that looks like the best of a diminishing list of long-term solutions - Mr. Schwartz points out it "won't do a damn thing to solve the problems we face today.

The city giveth, and the city taketh away. As recycling trucks finally begin pickups south of Cottman Avenue, the recycling schedule will be cut north of Cottman. Starting Dec. 7, the city will pick up newspapers, glass bottles and metal cans from homes in Tacony, Wissinoming, Mayfair, Oxford Circle, Lawndale and Crescentville. In preparation, starting Nov. 9, the weekly recycling schedule will be cut to every other week for 159,245 households already recycling in the Northeast and northwest Philadelphia.

State senators and business groups were trying yesterday to come up with compromise language to avoid a fight over a key section of Gov. Casey's mandatory-recycling legislation. The Senate took up the bill yesterday and approved an amendment giving local governments greater freedom in deciding what sort of materials homeowners would be compelled to recycle. But the sponsor of the bill, Sen. D. Michael Fisher (R., Allegheny), said the big fight over the legislation would come today.

Concerns about recycling in Rose Valley have prompted the Borough Council to form a committee to study the borough's options for collecting material to be recycled. "I think we're going to be forced into it," said borough manager Paula Healy at the council meeting Wednesday night. Residents now take glass to a local fire company for recycling and use recycling bins in neighboring towns for newspapers. The state's Act 101 requires that municipalities with more than 10,000 residents set up recycling programs by September.

Democratic freeholder candidates Ted Costa and Mary Anne Reinhart yesterday accused their incumbent opponents and the three other Burlington County freeholders of wasting taxpayers' money to build unnecessary and costly recycling plants. Costa and Reinhart said in a news release that the freeholders had refused to use existing privately run recycling stations, although state law required that local governments include private companies in their recycling plans. This is the second attack in a week that the Democrats have made on the freeholders' fiscal management of taxpayers' money.

Charles T. Duffy has some good news for Aldan Borough Council members about the borough's paper-recycling program. The borough did not have to pay in February to have the paper it had collected recycled, said Duffy, chairman of the Sanitation Committee, at a council caucus meeting Wednesday. In January, the borough was asked by Pasco Inc. of Philadelphia to pay $5 a ton to have its paper recycled. In February, Pasco did not charge the borough anything for recycling. Last summer, Pasco paid the borough $15 a ton to recycle its paper.

Firefighters battled a smoky fire in a recycling transfer center on the Delaware River in South Philadelphia for over an hour today before bringing it under control. No injuries were reported in the lunch time fire at the Republic Services Transfer & Recycling Center, 2904. S. Delaware Ave. The fire sent smoke billowing throughout the area, including nearby I-95, and a Hazmat Unit was called in as precaution because of large fuel tank at the facility. The unit's services were not needed.

Paul McCartney, Irving Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein all wrote high-profile music that wasn't entirely theirs. They use orchestrators (Bernstein in West Side Story ), musical secretaries (Irving Berlin), and even collaborators (McCartney's concert works) to help get their thoughts on paper. But then, all three are most famous for their popular music, in which a composer's musical ambitions may outstretch the mechanics of bringing it into being. A classical composer, in contrast, is supposed to be a romantic lone artist communing with the muses - not recycling music from an unused film score or a deceased colleague.

The funeral director was discussing cremation with the bereaved family. When she told them that their father's artificial joint would be removed from the ashes and sent to a facility where the metal would be recycled, the mood brightened. "Dad was all about recycling," the mourners told Maryeileen Appio, manager of the Kirk & Nice funeral home in Plymouth Meeting. Appio recalled their saying, "He'd be thrilled that one of the last things he could do was have some parts recycled.

The Philadelphia electronics recycling operation owned by eForce Compliance has received e-Stewards certification, a standard developed by the Basel Action Network to encourage best practices in the industry. It is the first business in Philadelphia to reach the standard, according to BAN. While other standards exist, including one promoted by the electronics industry, the e-Stewards standard is considered to be more rigorous. It requires "downstream" responsibility for electronics components and prohibits the export of hazardous electronics waste to developing countries.

Do you ever drive around your neighborhood and notice who the big-time recyclers are - or aren't? Do you ever feel guilty when you put something in the trash because you don't feel like walking to the recycling bin? Do you toss food scraps in with the other garbage? If you said yes, you're not alone. Only a third of the trash that could be recycled or composted actually is. No wonder the typical household trash can is always overflowing. That means we can all do a bit better. I want to share some simple techniques to put your recycling routine on steroids.

In 1987, New Jersey became the first state in the country to require residents to recycle, a milestone in the environmental movement that set off a massive surge in recycling around the country. For years in the Garden State, never perceived as the most environmentally pristine of places, recycling rates grew and grew. But in the last decade and a half, despite a global environmental movement that has turned words such as green and sustainability into popular lingo, New Jersey's recycling program has faltered.

Happy with all those new electronic devices you got for Christmas? Not so fast, Bucko: What about the old ones? You are going to recycle them, right? It's getting easier. State laws forbidding their disposal in landfills - already in effect in New Jersey, and coming into effect in 2013 in Pennsylvania - mean that opportunities for responsibly ditching the out-of-date devices are growing fast. Already, both states make manufacturers responsible for the afterlife of the devices they produce.

IF YOU'RE FED up with the filth in Philly, email me at trash@phillynews.com , or find my page on Facebook. The story of neighbors watching their areas gradually dissolve into varying states of disrepair sounds like a broken record to the weathered and worn-down Marquis. But it's always inspiring to see folks pull together to make their communities more desirable. It happens all over the city, I'm sure, but a particularly uplifting example is a tidy two-block stretch of Clementine Street, between Kensington Avenue and Jasper Street.

Eastern Metal Recycling Terminal L.L.C., with a heap of crushed scrap at the foot of the Platt Memorial Bridge in South Philadelphia, has received a setback in its move to Eddystone. The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, on behalf of the administration of Gov. Corbett, rescinded $31.1 million promised by Gov. Rendell to develop a pier on the Delaware River. The scrap recycler, formerly Camden Iron & Metal Inc., will spend $60 million to transform the vacant Foamex Industrial Inc. property in Eddystone, with seven buildings, into a modern scrap-metal shredding operation.

PHILADELPHIA New SEPTA station Construction has been completed on SEPTA's new and relocated Parkside Bus Loop. The state-of-the-art facility, on 50th Street near Merion Avenue in Parkside, began serving residents and businesses this week. The loop is a key part of SEPTA's operation of Bus Routes 40, 43, 64 and 52. The old loop dated back nearly a century and was overdue for modern upgrades. Recycling cartons Mayor Nutter, the Streets Department and the Carton Council, an organization of carton-makers, have announced that food and beverage cartons are now recyclable as a part of the city's residential curbside recycling program.