[greenyes] Plastic film in the Orange Co. NC Waste Stream and a Commercial Collections Query

["Blair Pollock" <bpollock@no.address>]

In reply to the posting on 9/18 on plastic bags, we have recently
completed our fourth waste sort (we do one every five years) One
category is plastic film of which bags are one component:
so some data by weight as % of total in all samples taken:
                               1995             2000              
2005
Commercial                4.8%           7.8%            6.0%

Residential                 4.3%            5.7%               5.6%

We collected 250 scoop samples from each jurisdiction & each type of
waste that comes to our small (60,000tpy) publicly owned Landfill. I
don't know how much is bags v. how much is other film and of the bags
how much is recyclable grocery bags (where a lot of political energy
seems to be focused. Our communities heavily encourage plastic bagging
of waste although it is collected from semi automated & automated carts.
 You can see that film is consistently a large portion of the waste
stream here in our decidely non-industrial county w/ a waste stream that
is 50% residential, 35% commercial & about 15% multifamily. Hope this is
useful to some.

On another note: Our community has has a ban on landfilling oof
non-residential corrugated cardboard for nine  years and we now have a
highly developed OCC collection infrastructure, all private (except our
dropoff sites) One option is to 'encourage' all theprivate haulers of
OCC to add all other fiber to their OCC loads (and maybe comm. generated
film too) v. establishing a whole 'nother infrastructure for recyclable
fiber collection or creating our own publicly controlled infrastructure.
 

Thus the question(s) : 

Have others successfully added all fiber to existing OCC programs,  how
has that been quality wise, participation wise, etc. 

What type of logistical problems arise when you have only the OCC slot
for loading other fiber v. keeping dumpster sides or top open to readily
accept other fiber and getting garbage and waste from others

Has there been any success w/ directing those fiber loads to a specific
facility to maintain some level of flow to an existing or planned MRF? 
or is it mostly laissez faire both for collection & desitnation.

Thanks for any help you can render.


If everyone in Orange County recycled two more aluminum cans a week
we would recycle over twelve million more cans a
year.__________________________________________________

Blair Pollock
Solid Waste Planner
(919) 968-2788
fax: (919) 932-2900
PO Box 17177
Chapel Hill, NC 27516-7177