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Last week we went to Canada, today we’ll go to someplace a little closer, Colorado.
A Resource Recycling newsletter article recently started with this statement: “With a local landfill nearing capacity, one mid-sized city in the Rocky Mountain region is planning for the future of its waste management system — and gearing up to tackle additional streams in the process.”
The city being addressed is Fort Collins, Colorado. It’s a college town with about 170,000 residents. Its high degree of curbside recycling participation has a diversion rate above the state’s average.
In 2018, with the city’s residential program having a 26.9% diversion rate, it collected 8,450 tons of single-stream material. This was significantly above Colorado’s statewide rate of 17.2%.
Even with this being the case, the city has plans in the coming years to increase the diversion even further. It should be noted that Fort Collins has no specific recycling requirements; however, there are landfill bans for cardboard and electronics. Additionally, with their automatic recycling service as part of garbage collection, 96% of residents have recycling service.
One of the reasons for citizens to want to recycle is the city's pay-as-you-throw system. Under this system, residents can choose from three sizes of garbage receptacles, with the price doubling as the size increases. However, with the garbage service, up to two 96-gallon recycling carts are included at no additional charge.
In an open-market collection system, the city has three haulers licensed to operate in the community. Although these companies must collect a certain list of materials, they can collect those materials using whatever collection system they prefer. Currently, all the haulers use a single-stream service.
The city also owns and operates a drop-off recycling center. Here, they take everyday recyclables plus hazardous materials. This center has a steady flow of traffic, with a single day high of over 4,000 visits last fall.
Although not the only landfill in the county, this primary one is expected to reach capacity in 2024. Thus, city planners are working with other municipalities in the county towards meeting future needs.
Not only are they looking and developing a new landfill site, but including in it a construction and demolition waste facility and compost facility for yard trimmings and food waste. The city will also be increasing their residential collection by including most multi-family and commercial properties to receive recycling service.
In Colorado, just as here, hail storms are a fact of life. Thus, due to a recent hail storm, many homes needed roof replacement. In the city alone, over 8,500 permits for roof replacement were issued last year.
With the average home there having 4 to 5 tons of the old damaged shingles removed, about 15% of the waste stream brought to the recycling center was asphalt shingles. With this being the case, in order to reduce the amount, the city recently implemented a requirement that roof replacements use Class 4 shingles.
This class of shingles has the highest rating to withstand weather storm damage. These shingles were developed to withstand hail of two inches or larger. Twoinch hail is pretty large. Wish I had known about the availability of such shingles when I had my roofing replaced a couple of weeks ago due to earlier hail damage.
With that, I’ll close, wishing you an enjoyable, healthy and safe week.
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Ollie is a local citizen concerned with the environment and helping others. A retired Air Force fighter and instructor pilot, he is a graduate of Leadership San Marcos and received his degrees at Texas State University where he worked on staff before totally retiring. For questions or comments, he invites you to call him at 512-353-7432.
