Recycling is reusing or reprocessing of materials that you don't need
any more (and you'd normally throw away). This means you use metal cans to
make new metal cans, form new glass bottles out of used bottles and print
newspapers - a typical throw-away-product - on recycled paper.
The word recycling containes 'cycle' which refers to the a cycle of goods and
raw materials in recycling.
Recycling needs seperate collection and processing of commercial or residential
waste to turn it into something the producers of goods use to produce new goods.
Only few new raw materials are necessary.
In today's situation, it's up to you to participate voluntarily
in recycling and to seperate the different raw materials to keep them from
being trash and crowding landfills.
Columbia offers various opportunities for recycling. Yet the most
convenient solutions are still in their discussion phase. But nontheless
you can participate in a variety of recycling activities such as composting,
curbside collection and more. To find out about them, please read the
How to Recycle section.
Also included are hints how to prepare and keep recyclables for currbside
recycling.
There are several problems with Columbia's recycling system. The one with the
biggest impact is that residents pay for curbside trash pickup without paying
for the amount of trash produced. If people had to pay their trash by volume
or by weight, there would be a motivation to recycle.
Furthermore, it takes a huge effort to recycle all materials. The curbside
recycling service for example picks up only one kind of plastic: milk jugs.
For the other plastic products, you need to go to Civic Recycling, the
grocery store containers or some shops. Instead of disposing the recycleables
within one ride, it will be an odyssee atound town. Few residents are willing
to do so.
Latley the discussion about recycling fired up: the "Bluebag" project finally
published a report. The bluebag experiment was about providing some blocks
with blue trashbags to collect most recyclables in them for curbside pickup.
This is a similar approach like Germany's 'Duales System' where packages, containers
and other recyclables are collected with yellow bags or yellow trashcans.
Due to recent press reports, the use of a bluebag system increases the amount
of recyclables collectet significantly. Now it's up to Columbia and its residents
to get a good and convenient recycling system started. Blue bagging is much the
same as today's curbisde pick-up, but with the blue bags you don't have to
store and seperate the materials for two weeks; you just have a second trash can
where you use the blue bags.
The final step of any successful recycling approach is to force products that
can't be recycled out of the market. Either, producers do the first step or
they must be forced to do it by negative PR and boycott.
A current article about resident's recycling activities, different systems and
their consideration in Columbia can be found in "Peaceworks Monitor", Vol.10,
No.5, Late Fall 1995, available for free at the Pace Nook, 804 C East Broadway.
From the point of view of a bicycle driver without a car, recycling in Columbia
is very inconvenient. Only composting and curbside recycling of the few
materials being picked up are possible due to the remote locations of both
recycling bins and Civic Recycling. Placing several recycling bins downtown
would be helpful. The only recycling bin known to the author is on the campus
of the University of Missouri-Columbuia. See below for the location. Note that
this specific bin is put up by the University and not by the town.
Increasing the deposit on beverage containers, application of the ordinance to
food cans and special taxes on environmentally dangerous
products may be a path to the future. Germany has introduced a deposit of about
50 cents on plastic beverage bottles a few years ago to enforce recycling.