Barrett Jensen is on a mission to educate. As the Mesa County, CO’s solid waste manager, he is determined to find out what Mesa County is throwing into the landfill and to encourage residents to take the first step in reducing their contributions to what will be an expensive undertaking for taxpayers.
Jensen and his staff started a waste study last month, funded by a grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The study will provide information on exactly what types of materials are being thrown away at households, trucked to the landfill and buried forever in the facility, taking up space that is quickly running out.
Landfill officials suspect about 65 percent of the waste thrown away at the facility each year could be re-used, recycled or composted. If that happened, it would reduce the rate of trash coming into the landfill, extending the life of the facility, which has a limited amount of space remaining.
The initial sort for the waste study happened last month over the course of six days. Participants sorted through bags of trash, talking to the trash truck drivers to make sure they weren’t just getting loads from the same neighborhoods so they could get a representative sample.
They opened the bags, sorting the trash piece by piece and categorizing it to determine how much of each item was thrown away. Each day they sorted 600 pounds of trash. The trash sorting was conducted by volunteers, landfill staff and representatives from Curbside Recycling. The study results will show how much of each type of material was thrown away.
If there’s one thing Jensen has learned from looking at Mesa County’s household trash so far, it is that there are an awful lot of water bottles coming into the landfill, a frustrating thing for him because they’re recyclable. “We’re not recycling the easy stuff right now,” he said.
Read the full story at https://www.gjsentinel.com/lifestyle/waste-study-looks-at-what-mesa-county-residents-throw-away/article_9c40e722-92dd-11e8-a57d-10604b9f1ff4.html.