Lexington, KY - Recycling various items of your trash is not just an altruistic boondoggle designed to appease vocal critics of towering landfills and reckless waste. Recycling is a job-generating industry, and it is growing -
even here in Lexington.
Within the year, according to Steve Feese, the director of Waste Management within the LFUCG Department of Environmental Quality, the city plans to upgrade its existing recycling facility at the corner of Manchester Street and Thompson Road by tripling the amount of tonnage it accepts at a given time.
In July, the city purchased 30 acres of land adjacent to its Division of Waste Management offices off of Old Frankfort Pike with the hopes of building an entirely new recycling campus -
a facility that could utilize a much wider palette of recycling innovations and broaden the scope of materials the city is able to accept, such as Styrofoam or food waste for composting. "Food waste is the last frontier," Feese said, "the last untapped chunk of the pie chart."
This is all in keeping with a recently completed "waste stream characterization" survey, the first of its kind the city has ever commissioned, which analyzed and made recommendations regarding every aspect of the city's waste treatment - such as infrastructure, public education and venues.
Different venues -
places where waste is created, such as public spaces -
pose challenges to waste officials who are trying to reroute as much waste from the landfill to recycling centers. Festivals and street-side receptacles are obvious culprits, but Feese said the city plans to put into place new separated containers, such as the ones available during the Fourth of July Festival downtown this summer.
"A lot of the waste we generate as citizens isn't necessarily generated at home, it's generated at work, at the mall, going out to a restaurant," Feese said. "And accommodating and diverting waste from those venues is a bit more challenging because those venues are a bit more different - you kind of have to customize what you're doing compared to households, where everybody is pretty much generating the same thing and is serviced the same way."
Currently, there are approximately 70,000 residential Rosie recycling containers in Fayette County, but only about 5,000 other Rosies for commercial use -
a number that will hopefully escalate as the Division of Waste Management becomes more nimble in the services it provides.
"It ultimately lowers the cost of waste management for the community of Lexington," Feese said. "And it helps create jobs where jobs did not exist before. If you bury an aluminum can in a landfill, you've got one guy on a bulldozer; if you're recycling an aluminum can, it creates high-dollar manufacturing jobs for several people along the way."
Even so, Feese estimates that approximately 85 percent of materials that make it to the landfill should actually be going through the recycling center -
that's poor environmental stewardship and lazy business practice, since many recycled materials are resold to the market.
Click Here for a guide to Recycling Don'ts.
Click Here for a guide to Recycling Dos.
Visit the Department of Environmental Quality online at www.lexingtonky.gov to place your order for a Rosie if you do not already have one.