<< Back 6/19/02 Coordinated recycling efforts needed By Jason Kimenker It appears that a community-based recycling program is a valuable tool to maintain environmental and economic sustainability in any community. If nothing else, recycling saves money and resources. It helps reduce the increasingly large costs (financial and otherwise) of burying our trash and reuses the very materials that help create many of our current solid waste problems. Based on the ever-increasing costs associated with solid waste in Jackson County (we spent over $3.8 million last year) it may be worth considering what Macon, Swain and Haywood have already decided — a recycling coordinator is absolutely necessary for a recycling program to work properly in any community. Having a coordinator makes no guarantees, but it certainly does not hurt to be organized and coordinated in our efforts about something as important and costly as this. I am very appreciative of living and working in a community that has a recycling program. I’m proud to live in an area as beautiful, well spirited, and community-oriented as ours. I want to thank our community’s leaders for helping to start a recycling program in our community. As with anything worth making work, our community’s recycling program does have its flaws and some are in need of immediate attention. Only as a community coming together can we help make anything of this proportion happen. The most apparent flaw with Jackson County’s recycling program is we do not have a recycling coordinator (whose duty it is to coordinate our recycling efforts). Macon County, our landfill partner, does have such a position. Macon’s current recycling coordinator has indicated he would like to see more of a coordinated effort between our two counties. Managing a recycling program for an entire county is an undertaking requiring the expertise and experience our community’s leaders alone or even a hired technician cannot provide. There is something positive to be said about having an individual whose job it is to be in the trenches of recycling day-to-day, with the authority to make things happen. Their job would require them to constantly think of ways to keep our waste stream down and to make our recycling program work even better. A community-wide recycling effort requires the expertise of an individual coordinator with the experience to oversee and manage the day-to-day operations required in an effective recycling program. That is, someone who has the authority to make decisions and the accountability to make a recycling program work. For the sake of wanting to help make recycling work better in our community, Bobby Gunter of Country Collections has offered to take on the responsibility of coordinating recycling efforts in our community. He has offered to provide this valuable service at no cost to our county. Gunter appears sincere in his desire to help our community’s recycling program succeed. Bud Boyton and Gunter run Country Collections and have really improved the operation since the old owner left the county in a lurch. Gunter and his wife have offered to give a tour of the family-run operation in Dillsboro to anyone with a desire to find out more about recycling in our community. He can explain what is and is not working with recycling and how we can better our program for everyone in our community. Because he handles the day-to-day recycling operations for our entire county, including Sylva’s mandatory recycling program, for the moment I can think of no better person to take on this responsibility. Coordinating our recycling efforts will save everyone money in the process. I’m sure others will also step forward to offer help if our leadership wants this to happen. Recycling doesn’t happen by itself. It takes leadership and dedication. I have great respect for the underdog who pushes forward despite the odds against him or her. The odds are completely up to us in this case, either we want to succeed (and save money) and will do whatever we have to do to make that happen or we do not and will not. The choice is ours to make. Our public involvement in countywide recycling is improving, but without appropriate coordination it is very difficult to proceed much further. This is not something that needs to wait until next year or even next month. This can happen tomorrow. Just pick up your telephone and call, write or visit your distinguished community leaders and let them know you want recycling in our county to be a coordinated effort that works for our community and our children’s children’s community. What we need is a recycling program led by someone whose only job is to make recycling work in our community and who has the authority to make that happen. Who will be that person? Who will ask our leaders that question with me? Kimenker is the newly elected chairperson for the Sustainable Business Commu-nity of the Tuckasegee watershed. He and his wife own Soul Infusion Tea House & Bistro in Sylva. He may be reached at jason@wnc.us.