Posted by
Oude Yi on Saturday, November 07, 2009 12:00:00 AM
One of America's biggest plastic bottle recycling plants is set to open in Fayetteville next year.
It better not be counting on the surrounding area for raw material.
Seven of the Cape Fear region's 10 counties, including Cumberland County, finished in the bottom third of North Carolina counties for recycling plastic bottles last year.
The
region has nowhere to go but up. A state law taking effect Thursday
could help. Recyclable plastic bottles with screw tops or snap caps
will be banned from landfills.
In
a region where tons of the bottles apparently end up in landfills every
year, will people who don't find it easy being green have anything to
worry about?
Enforcement of the law is critical, said Ron Salati, general manager of Clear Path Recycling LLC, which is building the Fayetteville plant.
"It's going to be a difficult task," said Salati.
Others outside government are more skeptical.
On
the Web site of the political-chat television show "NC Spin," a blogger
asked: "What good does it do to pass a law requiring citizens to
recycle plastic bottles if there is no penalty when they don't?"
The legal burden will fall largely on landfill operators rather than consumers.
"There's not going to be a recycling police," said Jerry Dietzen, head of Fayetteville's Environmental Services Department.
The
N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources will watch for
large quantities of plastic bottles being dumped in landfills, said
state recycling coordinator Scott Mouw.
If
a waste hauler is spotted with a lot of bottles to dump, Dietzen said,
state inspectors will try to trace the load to find out who threw the
containers in the trash. The inspectors will acquaint those responsible
with the new law, Dietzen said.
But
inspectors may sanction landfill operators for disposal violations,
Mouw said, just like the state does now for windblown debris or
polluted groundwater.
Salati
said Clear Path will accept any help it can get. "Anything that's kept
out of a landfill is additional product that's available for recycling
for us," he said.
County rankings
The latest state figures suggest Cumberland County could be doing more for the new hometown business.
The county recycled barely half a pound of plastic bottles per resident in 2008. That was 87th out of 100 counties in the state.
Orange County led the state by reclaiming nearly 30 pounds per resident.
But those figures are more than a year old, covering a 12-month period that ended June 30, 2008. Fayetteville started a successful curbside recycling program the following week.
Dietzen promised that Cumberland County's 2009 numbers will improve. "Ours are going to go way up with the next report," he said.
That
report, due in December, will cover a period that coincides with the
first year that the city picked up recyclable material at single-family
residences.
Besides
curbside pickup, Dietzen said, the city has begun collecting plastic
bottles from public buildings and will start doing the same at athletic
fields this fall.
The best bottle recyclers in the Cape Fear region were in Scotland County. More than 5 pounds of bottles were recovered last year for every county resident, good for 26th place in the state.
"It has to start with the county commissioners," said J.R. Horne, Scotland County's recycling coordinator.
Horne estimated that 80 percent of Scotland County residents recycle household waste weekly.
At the other end of the regional scale is Harnett County, where a task force reported last year that just 20 percent of residents visited recycling drop-off locations.
That might explain why Harnett County
had just about the worst rate of bottle recycling in the state last
year. Four smaller rural counties that don't recycle plastic bottles or
failed to report to the state finished below Harnett County.
Jerry Blanchard, director of the Harnett County General Services Department, blamed the state reporting process.
Harnett County
accepts commingled material at its seven drop-off locations. So,
Blanchard said, the county has trouble reporting the volume of bottles
or aluminum cans that are recycled because the waste arrives mixed
together.
Nevertheless, Harnett County also fared poorly when all recyclable material is considered. Last year, only Robeson County recycled less total material than Harnett County in the Cape Fear region.
Jon Parsons, executive director of the regional environmental group Sustainable Sandhills, said Harnett County has increased the number of materials accepted for recycling as a result of the recycling task force's work.
"I
expect that Harnett's ranking will also improve in the next year's
report," Parsons said in an e-mail, "although I wouldn't expect as much
improvement as Cumblerland's."
Nationwide trends
Harnett County isn't out of step with the rest of the country. Americans recycle less than 25 percent of their plastic bottles.
Salati said recycling rates jump above 60 percent in states with bottle-deposit laws, such as California and New York.
Weak as North Carolina's new law is, Salati said his company is glad for it.
Unfortunately for Clear Path, increased recycling in the vicinity of the new plant won't boost efficiency much.
By
2012, when the plant is expected to be fully operational, it will be
able to handle 20 percent of all polyethylene terephthalate bottles, or
PET, that are recycled in the nation. PET bottles have the number 1
embossed on the bottom.
The Fayetteville
plant will be capable of handling 280 million pounds of the bottles in
a year. The recycled material will go into polyester-based products
made by Clear Path's owners, Charlotte-based DAK Americas LLC and Shaw
Industries Group Inc. of Georgia.
Yet
even if Clear Path recycled every PET bottle discarded in the state,
Salati said, the plant would still operate at less than half of its
capacity.
Clear Path will need to bring in plastic bottles from 48 of the 50 states, he said.
Source from:http://www.odemade.com/news/item_831.html