Recycling

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.

Although it has no legal obligation to, Hulmeville Borough may decide to start recycling in 1991. The subject came up at Monday night's Borough Council meeting, when the borough awarded its new contract for residential trash removal to the low bidder, Waste Automation Corp. Waste Automation now hauls Hulmeville's trash, without recycling, at a cost of about $42,000 a year. If recycling is included, the new contract would cost $94,159, or $47,079 per year, over the two-year period.

Aldan's new glass-recycling program has been successful in the short time the borough has had two recycling igloos, according to Borough Councilman Charles Duffy. "It has really taken off. . . . The residents really seem to be cooperating, and the word has gotten around," Duffy said at a caucus meeting Wednesday. The two igloos were installed in December. After a recent inspection, Duffy said that the clear-glass igloo was about three-quarters full. The colored-glass igloo, which was not as full, was filled mostly with beer bottles, Duffy said.

By Don Lewis When I meet with customers, vendors, or leaders of other organizations, I am often asked a great question: How much work is involved in earning a reputation as a "sustainable" company? They ask me because they know SCA is a global leader in sustainability practices. This takes a serious commitment, and the best results come from organizations where sustainability efforts are both top-down and bottom-up. Here's what I mean. Top-down is the organization taking the lead on creating a vision with its sustainability ambitions.

This spring, thousands of college students across the nation will aim to be below average. To that end, they'll go through their dorm-room closets, dressers, gym bags, and more, seeking to weed out all the clothes they don't need anymore, won't wear again, or simply can't fit into the luggage they're taking home. I say "below average" because, apparently, the average person tosses a lot. According to the latest municipal solid waste report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about 13 million tons of textiles - a grab-bag group that includes more than clothing, but it's the closest the report gets - entered the municipal waste stream in 2010.

As Jersey Shore towns look for ways to rebuild boardwalks destroyed by Hurricane Sandy, one company is offering a recycled building material that it says is more durable than wood and reuses tons of plastic that would otherwise end up in landfills. Axion International, based in Union County, combines the kinds of plastic used in milk jugs and car dashboards to fabricate a substance that is strong enough to make railroad ties, and is resistant to the waves and water that degrade wooden boardwalks over time.

As construction was winding down at the new Blessed Teresa of Calcutta Church building in Limerick, Jack Schmidt sneaked in to get a glimpse of his past. The retired Peco worker had grown up in West Kensington as a member of St. Boniface Catholic Church, which closed in 2006 and which was demolished last year. But inside Blessed Teresa was a 37-foot-high reminder of the years Schmidt, 71, served as an altar boy, attended Boy Scout meetings, and went to school in the Philadelphia parish.

The moment the polls closed Tuesday, millions of dollars' worth of campaign signs morphed into unwieldy trash. Signs of varying sizes and shapes, pigmented with dyes and mounted on pointy lawn spikes, are hard to fit in trash cans and need to be broken down before they can be recycled in most facilities. So Montgomery County's Recycling Office is offering free drop-off sites and working with recycling companies to take the waste away. The seed for the innovative program was sown a couple of years ago in Upper Dublin, which is "sort of the poster child for recycling and environmentally friendly stuff," said Mary Anne Fennell, the township's recycling coordinator.

THE FIRST LADY of the United States walked onstage to celebrate her husband's re-election Tuesday night doing what for most of her predecessors would have been unthinkable - wearing a dress she'd been seen in before. Michelle Obama has worn that understated burgundy Michael Kors silk chine pin-tucked dress not once but two other times. She was photographed in it at a 2010 Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House and again at a holiday party in 2009. The fact that FLOTUS was willing to shop in her closet, as they say, for such a momentous occasion as her husband's historic re-election reflects her sensitivity to what's going on around the country.

A man working at a Camden glass recycling plant was killed overnight after becoming ensnared 20-feet up in running machinery, authorities said. Jason Laughlin, spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, confirmed the death, but had no further details. The industrial accident took place in a cullet glass recycling facility on the 2000 block of Mount Ephraim Ave. Glass is crushed and melted into what's known as cullet for reuse. The lower half of the man's body was reportedly stuck in the machine as it ran.

At Lincoln Financial Field, workers rip open trash bags after Eagles games, on the lookout for wayward pizza crusts and french fries. At Holmesburg Prison, inmates mix vegetable trimmings and leftover green beans into a large pile of wood chips. At the Federal Reserve Bank, M. Lee Meinicke drives her truck in to make a withdrawal - of food scraps from the cafeteria. In the continuing battle to reduce the waste stream - the stuff going to landfills and incinerators, at great expense for businesses and municipalities - food is considered to be "the next frontier" of recycling, said Maurice Sampson II, a solid-waste expert.

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.