What can be recycled?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Reduce, reuse and recycle are all ways to reduce solid waste buildup in landfills. Reduce means lessening the amount of items or resources being consumed and finding alternatives to reduce our use. Reuse means extending the 'life' of an item or repurposing it rather than discarding it.

Materials to recycle in Cochise County. When the transfer stations start accepting recyclable materials, they will probably accept plastics, aluminum and steel cans, old newspaper, old corrugated cardboard, sorted office paper, mixed paper, and scrap metal. Current market prices for a lot of these materials, particularly plastics, aluminum and steel cans, and office paper, are quite high.

Plastics. Usually only #1 (PET, PETE - Polyethylene terephthalate; soft drink and water bottles), and #2 (HDPE - High density polyethylene; milk, juice, and water bottles) plastics are accepted at recycling facilities and that is likely to be the case in Cochise County for the foreseeable future. Trash and retail bags are also HDPE but are usually NOT accepted for recycling. PVC (#3 - Polyvinyl chloride; juice bottles, PVC piping) is hard to recycle because of its high chlorine content and many additives, and a small amount of PVC can contaminate a batch of PET and HDPE.
Mixed paper usually includes glossy paper (catalogs and magazines) but this material is harder to recycle as it has a clay coating that some paper mills can't handle. Paper is the number one material that we throw away. For every 100 pounds of trash we throw away, 35 pounds is paper. Newspapers take up about 14 percent of landfill space, and paper in packaging accounts for another 15 to 20 percent.

Glass is usually not recycled back into new glass. It is collected in Tucson but is currently ground up for use as a filler in concrete and road surfacing materials. I don't expect glass to be recycled in Cochise County at all. If you collect glass, drop it off at one of the 15 recycling collection centers in Tucson next time you're up there.

Recycling - Where to Go?

For now, residents of Portal, Paradise and Whitetail can drop off recyclables at points removed - Willcox, Douglas, and Tucson. By the end of the year (and I hope sooner), there will be facilities for collecting recycables at all the urban and rural transfer stations in Cochise County. (See Department of Solid Waste for the locations of all the 14 transfer stations. Portal/Paradise is listed as a rural transfer station but, as you know, a roll-off container for collecting solid waste does not stay there.) In the meantime you can leave your plastics, paper, cans, aluminum, cardboard, and scrap metal at:

FRV Metals and Recycling - 789 N. Douglas Ave., Douglas (On the west side of town near Pirtleville) 364 3671. Accepts metal, cardboard, paper, aluminum, cans.

Express Recycling - 700 E. Maley St., Willcox (Near VTC offices, at the Twin Lakes turnoff) 384 4196. Accepts plastic, metal, cardboard, and aluminum.

City of Willcox accepts paper and cardboard in dumpsters on Railroad Avenue.

Further afield, there are 15 locations in Tucson that accept recyclables (Paper, plastic, cardboard, metal, aluminum, and glass); see Tucson Clean and Beautful for the locations of these dropoff sites. (The home page for Tucson Clean and Beautiful has some useful information too.)
There is no facility in Cochise County that I am aware of that accepts glass for recycling. (More on that next week.)

Recycling Update

Last year Cochise County commissioned R. W. Beck, Inc., to assess the current state of the County's solid waste operations and assess the economics of undertaking recycling across the County. Beck submitted an interim report on May 19 and met with members of the Recycling Committee and County officials on June 9. They will make a final presentation to the Rate Review Board and to the Board of Supervisors on August 12.

The report (Recycling Feasibility Study) is long (136 pages) and unnecessarily verbose in places. However, it is a comprehensive review of the current state of solid waste operations in Cochise County and an in-depth analysis of the economics of recycling in the County. Beck studied a number of recycling scenarios, including (a) gathering recycling materials, compacting them, and hauling to Tucson, and (b) collecting recyclables and sorting and compacting in an unused Material Recycling Facility (MRF) at Huachuca City. The economics of hauling to an existing MRF in Tucson are dubious at best and the Recycling Committee recommended on July 7 that the County start negotiations with Huachuca City to renovate and use the MRF there.

A County-wide recycling operation will depend on the cities (Benson, Bisbee, Douglas, Sierra Vista, and Willcox) embracing recycling within their jurisdiction. Some cities all already starting this (See the Sierra Vista Herald for Sunday July 6); Sierra Vista has a curb side program and Bisbee is getting into the act too. In subsequent posts, I will discuss how the recycling program will (probably) be implemented and what options there will be for rural residents.

If you're interested in seeing a copy of Beck's report (136 page PDF - 4.4 MB) or their June 9 presentation (38 page PDF - 440KB), let me know (hedleybond@earthlink.net) and I'll send you a (digital) copy.

Recycling Update

Comments and updates from the March 6 Recycling Committee Meeting

1. Joe Walsh FRV Metals and Recycling, Douglas
Does recycling in Douglas – including presentations to schools. Has a couple of recycling bins in front of his business (789 N. Douglas Ave.) and recycles paper, plastic, Al cans, and industrial materials, particularly metal.

2. Jim Jones, Sierra Vista
Helped organize a grass roots, volunteer recycling of plastic bags. WalMart buys the bags and this is good money for schools.

3. Huachuca City is not part of the County waste disposal system; they have their own landfill and get trash from Fort Huachuca. They did some recycling earlier but the facility is now closed.

4. Resources: National Association of Counties http://www.naco.org/ . This site has some information on recycling.

5. Would be nice to have better directions to all the County transfer stations, along with hours etc.

6. Sooner or later we'll need to provide (County Web site, SV Herald, etc.) some directions and tips on recycling. A questionnaire/online form for gathering data on what people are doing to recycle, where they take things, etc. could be very helpul. And we do need to know the endpoints of electronic recycling.

Recycling in Cochise County

I was recently appointed to the Cochise County Solid Waste Recycling Committee, with a term ending in June 30, 2009. The committee consists of nine members, three from each district. Our basic mandate is to advise the Board of Supervisors on recycling within the County, but we may end up looking into the 3 R's - reduce, reuse, and recycle. We had our first meeting last Tuesday (Feb. 19) at the Board of Supervisors Conference Room in Bisbee and the second meeting will be on Thursday March 6 at 5:30.
Developing a comprehensive county-wide recycling plan will not be simple. Cochise County is a large county (6,219 sq ml - or almost 80 mls x 80 mls) with a relatively low population (Currently 139,000; was 118,000 in 2000) and seven incorporated cities. Last year over 90,000 tons of solid waste were hauled to the Whetsone landfill, with the haulers covering over 400,000 miles. Some of the cities do some recycling, and Sierra Vista recently introduced a limited curbside recycling program. The County operates five urban transfer stations and 11 rural transfer stations (but this tally includes both Portal and Paradise as transfer stations!). The urban transfer stations collect trash and separate appliances, tires, used motor oil, batteries, and hazardous waster. Inmate labor at the Douglas, Bisbee, and Sierra Vista stations keep costs down. Any recycling plan will need to be incorporated across the County and within all the incorporated cities.
Cochise County has also hired consultants (R. W. Beck) to assess the overall solid waste program and make recommendations; their final report is expected in May.
Once we're up to speed, we'll be meeting more or less monthly. All the meetings are open to the public, and any and all are welcome to attend. I'll be posting findings, meeting times and places, and exciting developments here on a relatively regular basis. In the meantime, I'll be looking more closely at recycling options and waste handling and pickup across the County, as well as checking out adopted plans and programs elsewhere. Please contact me (e-mail works best!) with relevant input, comments, and suggestions. We can't work in isolation from County citizens and we'll be able to do a much better job with your open feedback. Thanks in advance!
As the Committee will be making recommendations to the Board of Supervisors, which could in turn be the basis for legal actions, all our meetings and deliberations are subject to the Open Meeting Law. All discussions and votes must be done at public meetings, and the public must receive notice of these meetings at least 24 hours in advance along with an agenda. Meetings can only consider matters listed on the agenda. This means that we can't really answer questions from the public at the meeting (as the questions weren't on the agenda); best done by adding it to the agenda of the next meeting. Furthermore, discussions between committee members outside of meetings are taboo. Technically, it's OK for two people to discuss matters when the quorum is five, but we were advised that this can very quickly become a slippery slope. However, communication between committee members and citizens is encouraged. And a committee member can't promise immediate action or results, however worthy as a suggestion may be; the suggestion has to be incorporated into an agenda and openly discussed at a meeting.

Has Construction Really Started?

I noticed recently that the Bowie Power Station Web site has not been updated for four months and that there has been no activity at the site. I spoke to Trevor Baggiore from the Air Quality Permitting Section of ADEQ and learned that there will not be a new round of licensing as SWPG will be using the same gas turbine as specified in the original proposal. The license would have expired on September 13, 2007 - 18 months from the date it was issued - if construction had not commenced. Construction is considered to have started if site work has begun or if a contract has been signed for construction. On Sept. 10, SWPG signed a contract with MMR Group for construction of the plant. As SWPG is wholly owned by MMR Group, this contract could be either a legitimate legal contract or a disingenuous way to get around a deadline. We'll see.

In a recent story in USA Today SWPG general manager Getts blamed increasing costs and uncertainties on carbon dioxide capture for the switch back to natural gas.

Change of Plans

On Friday August 31, SWPG issued a press release stating that they no longer wished to build an IGCC plant at Bowie and instead were going to pursue the original plan to build a 1,000MW natural gas plant on the same site instead. The press release is given in full along with events leading up to and immediately following the announcement at littlebigdog. Two days later, The Sierra Vista Herald ran a story on the change in plans with reactions from the three supervisors. On September 9 the Herald ran a particularly wrong-headed story about Bowie and the power plant which inflamed things further. The Board of Supervisors voted to extend the permit to build the gas plant on September 18.

On August 25 at the CCIPRA meeting, 6 days before the press release was issued, Tom Wray was still insisting that natural gas was too costly and that they were determined to build an IGCC plant. What happened to change their minds? There hasn't been any major change in natural gas prices so the answer probably has more to do with a political calculation that showed the IGCC plant might not be approved by the Board of Supervisors. Even if it was approved, they realized that if it went to a county wide referendum they would probably lose – hence better to burn natural gas than be turned down for IGCC. SWPG will still have to get ADEQ air quality permits for the natural gas plant, as even though the permits were issued earlier, they have changed gas turbines.

A natural gas plant is perhaps less undesirable than an IGCC plant as there will be no slag dump or evaporation basins but there still be a lot of carbon dioxide emitted and a lot of water used. Although many of the problems with an IGCC plant were aired over the last few months, we weren't able to get a serious consideration of conservation or of the wisdom of having private companies, rather than utilities, building power plants. An article in the New York Times on Sept. 16 stated that the New York State Attorney General has opened an investigation of five large energy companies, questioning whether their plans to build coal-fired power plants pose undisclosed financial risks that their investors should know about. “The AG, Andrew Cuomo, using the same state securities law wielded by his predecessor, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, to investigate corruption on Wall Street, sent subpoenas on Friday Sept. 14 to the top executives of the five companies, seeking internal documents. The companies, which have projects in various states, are AES Corporation, Dominion, Dynegy, Peabody Energy and Xcel Energy.” The only other power plant in Arizona that SWPG is associated with, Gila Bend Panda, is still operating but is in receivership.

In the last couple of weeks there have been further stories about opposition to coal plants, including serious and growing problems for a proposed plant in Holcomb, Kansas and a more general story by Peter Montague on the turn about that coal companies are facing.

I'll try to post updates on the “progress” at Bowie from time to time but I need to start devoting some time and space to other issues in the county.