By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
sallies@juno.com

There’s a certain irony in the kudos recently heaped on Peachtree City for recycling.

The city “was one of four Georgia cities ranked at the top of Georgia municipalities for its efforts to reduce solid waste entering landfills,” said The Citizen article. I’m delighted, of course, to see any diversion of materials from landfills, but we could be doing so much, much more.

Several times in just the past year, newcomers who perceive me as knowledgeable about the community have asked where they can take certain items to be recycled. Well, says I, newspapers and magazines are the easiest, since many of the schools, as well as the Public Works site on McIntosh Trail, have dumpsters out 24/7 for paper.

Cans and bottles: Neely fire station and the Rockaway Road recycling station take aluminum, but not metal bottles, nor plastic. Those you have to carry to the county transfer station in Fayetteville.

White paper: Forget about it in Fayette County. The only places I know that take office paper on the south side are Newnan Salvage and the receptacles at the Wal-Mart in Union City.

Cardboard: Corrugated only at the county and the Rockaway Road sites, but the cereal-box grade? Nowhere that I know of. And tree and shrub cuttings are so limited it may be easier to cut branches into little bites and send them down the garbage disposal. (I didn’t say that!)

“What?” they ask in dismay. “There’s no one place to take everything?” ’Fraid not. “Are you too cheap to pay your trash hauler to take recyclables?” snipes an acquaintance, overhearing my negative response. Yes, I reply, and for two good reasons.

First, by working at recycling even though it’s inconvenient, Dave and I have decreased the flow of landfill-bound trash from our house to one barrel a month, and that not always full. There’s no option for reduced rates for fewer pickups, hence, no incentive to recycle.

Of more concern, however, are credible reports from residents that companies are collecting fees purportedly to pick up recyclables, but route them to landfills anyhow. A Coweta waste hauler challenged by a customer said bluntly that he wasn’t making enough money off recyclables to make it worth his while, hence he was dumping them. A neighbor of ours got the same answer from her hauler when she asked why her carefully sorted recycle boxes were being poured into the back of the trash truck.

Sanitary workers have on several occasions called reporters with similar stories, but declined to identify themselves, so their allegations cannot be confirmed. It’s all about money. I’m not a student of economics, but even I understand that. It costs money to recycle and it still costs money to use recycled materials.

A report earlier this year trumpeted that recycling has failed because it’s just not cost-effective. Lots of things appear not be cost-effective, but in the long run, NOT recycling will cost far more in terms of energy, depletion of resources, degraded water and air quality, and landfill management than recycling possibly could.

None of this is new. We all know it depends on closing the loop and developing a market for products made of recycled materials. Government is doing a fair job mandating a percentage of government-issued paper products to be made of reclaimed materials. Now comes news of a revenue surplus on both county and federal levels, and discussions of how to use it creatively. Why not give tax breaks, substantial ones, for the reuse of recycled products, for truly fuel-efficient vehicles, for transportation innovations?

Make good environmental stewardship cost-effective at the day-in, day-out grass-roots level, and watch participation escalate. Or try Germany’s solution: Require merchants to accept recyclables in their stores. The amount of packaging materials declined steeply when buyers in stores with overflowing recycle bins demanded that manufacturers quit over-packaging products or they’d take their business elsewhere.

There are bins on every street corner as well, and citizens routinely toss bottles and cans and papers into them on their way to the subway every morning.

Permit me to float another idea (pun intended): Recycle water. Many communities are already studying the use of treated waste water for irrigation, but why not use residential gray water on lawns and gardens? All it would take is construction of a holding tank for the water that comes from showers, laundry, the backwash of filters, even swimming pool water, then pumping it out to irrigate landscaping.

I checked with Rick Fehr, Fayette County’s environmental health officer, and it sounds like the only thing preventing this from happening is essentially a matter of semantics. State laws prohibit the discharge of untreated sewage, and sewage is defined in such a way as to include both gray water and black water (water containing human waste).

The issue comes up every time there’s a drought, Rick says. I guess when the Georgia General Assembly meets in January, the winter rains have washed away our concern for summer water shortages.

I urge our representatives to push for studies to define exactly what components of gray water might be unhealthy — discharge from garbage disposals, perhaps? — and craft legislation that would permit the discharge of safe gray water onto lawns and gardens. (Contrary to the belief of many, incidentally, detergent and soap in water will not harm plants but may actually benefit them.)

This kind of recycling is a win-win no-brainer. It would take pressure off our sewer systems and reduce the demand for drinking water, conserving precious resources and using water that would otherwise be discarded. By making recycling practical and universal, Peachtree City and all of Georgia would have reason to brag.

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