Items tagged with 'garbage'
Albany switches to single-stream recycling
The City of Albany officially announced today that it's made the switch to single-stream recycling. (It had unofficially made the switch back in July.) That means A-Towners can throw all their recyclables into one bin, instead of sorting into the green and blue.* [TU]
Troy made this switch last October. And County Waste, the big private trash hauler, has been transitioning since the end of 2009.
The one-bin-for-them-all method theoretically will be easier for people. And if that increases the amount of stuff getting diverted from the landfill -- great. Back in 2009, a consultant reported that "significant quantities of designated recyclables" were ending up in the landfill. That's bad for at least a few reasons. One, because stuff that could recycled was being stuck in the ground. And two, because the Albany landfill, which takes trash from 16 municipalities, doesn't have a lot of space left -- it's anticipated to be full by the end of 2016. There's now discussion about creating a regional trash authority to deal with the problem. [TU] [Albany Landfill] [TU]
A flier with details about the constant "Can this be recycled?" question is after the jump.
* Right or wrong, we've been one-binning for months after we didn't get a green container. The stuff disappeared each week, so... uh... maybe it was OK.
Noted: incinerators, like stomachs, get upset when they eat too much ice cream
Stewart's posted on its Facebook page today about what's happened to all that ice cream it had to recall:
We are disposing of the recently recalled ice cream at an area landfill, as well as a burn plant. We can only send 40 tons of recalled ice cream, a day, to the burn plant -- more than that will put out the fire. We are destroying a total of 250 tons of ice cream!
In other Stewart's ice cream news, Jessica spotted Crumbs Along the Mohawk, back in circulation. (Crumbs has reportedly changed lives.)
Earlier on AOA: Stewart's ice cream recall info
photo: Stewart's Shops
That is a lot of garbage
We noticed this a little while back, but only snapped the picture yesterday: you can see the Rapp Road landfill all the way down Washington Ave where it crosses over Rt 85.
According to the Gmaps Pedometer, that's 3.3 miles as the crow (or, in the case probably, seagull) flies. That is a big hill of trash.
By the way: it's projected that the landfill will be full by the end of this year. So, where's all the trash going to go? Good question. The City of Albany is still trying to work things out with the DEC for an expansion of the facility.
And it's not just Albany that would be looking for a place to dump its trash -- more than 200,000 people in the Capital Region send their garbage to this facility.
Earlier on AOA:
+ How does pay-as-you-throw smell?
How does pay-as-you-throw smell?
The Albany landfill is running out of space. In fact, it's expected to be full by the end of next year. The city has been trying to get the state DEC to approve an expansion of the facility, but the DEC bounced the first few proposals and said something along the lines of "Come on. You're not even trying."
So the latest draft proposal includes a few strategies for reducing the amount of garbage thrown into the landfill. Among them is something called "pay-as-you-throw." It's pretty much what is sounds like -- the more you throw out, the more you pay.
OK, so does that actually work? We went dumpster diving for answers.
... said KGB about Drawing: What's something that brought you joy this year?