April 2019 - Parks & Recreation - 57

program. " Chicago Park District
is now getting quotes from vendors that can compost food waste.
To begin, CPD plans to compost
fruit, vegetables, cardboard boxes
and possibly bread, but not meat or
dairy. That is not all. The district
is working with its meal supplier
to evaluate menus and how meals
are packed with an eye to reducing
waste up front. In addition, it will
begin a staff training program and
is planning how to adaptively manage the program once underway.
Matthew Norton, sanitation recycling supervisor for East Bay Regional Park District (EPRB), says
that in recognition of a changing
landscape for recycling, EPRB
utilized a consultant to help develop a multiyear contract, which
includes provisions for trash, recyclables and organics at one of
its large regional parks. In other
parks, it uses local haulers and
as many as 10 different firms at a
cost of $0-$316 per ton, depending on the location and the park.
EPRB also contracts with a California-based crew of the Student
Conservation Association (SCA)
to collect recyclables from trailside containers on its extensive
trail network, and the SCA keeps
the proceeds it realizes from recyclable waste.
Some East Bay parks also collect organic materials, including
food scraps and paper towels for
composting either on-site or to
be hauled to off-site composting.
Park-generated and community-based food composting is clearly an innovative recycling effort
that can provide solutions to reducing the number of contaminated recyclables and to diverting
waste from landfills.
Certain recyclable materials are
no longer profitable, yet others re-

Instead of single-stream recycling, separating all recyclables at the source may
be key to effective recycling.

tain high value. Glass, for example,
is not just unrecyclable, it has negative value and many waste haulers
no longer even want to pick it up.
Aluminum, however, is 100 percent recyclable and there is excellent value in recycling it. It is also
a great way for park and recreation
agencies to engage with volunteer
and community groups to realize a
return on recycling.
There is new hope that returning to mixed-stream recycling can
make recycling profitable again.
" Clean-stream " and " Pay-as-youthrow " recycling may offer hope
for the future and, in fact, may
open new domestic markets for recyclable wastes that were formerly
shipped to foreign countries. Returning to dual-stream and multistream recycling is a way forward
for agencies and communities to
make recycling work. In parks, it
can be more than just a better way
to recycle: It can also be an effective way to educate the public on
how to recycle at home.
It will take a collective effort
to recycle in smarter ways. Agencies may need to commit to some
self-hauling of recyclables to a
processing center. Other specific
actions to reduce waste or divert
it from landfills include upcycling
formerly discarded materials; reducing unnecessary packaging in
purchasing, eliminating single-use
PET water bottles and installing
water filling stations.
The messaging to the public
about recycling is vitally important.
We may have to do things a different way, and, perhaps, it won't be
quite as easy as it has been, but
the benefits will be greater, and the

impacts even more significant, in a
climate-changing world.
Ana Alvarez told a surprisingly
moving story about how she came
to understand how people can
change their ways regarding waste
and recycling. " I came from Orange
County and we had big Easter programs. I always thought you can't
have an Easter egg hunt without
plastic Easter eggs, right? In the city
of Santa Fe Springs, they do it differently by choice. They carpet the
grass with many pieces of folded
paper. Children collect the pieces of
paper and open them to find a sticker inside and run to a central gathering place for a prize. It was hard for
me to imagine an Easter egg hunt
without the Easter eggs. I had to be
taught. I learned that the magic was
still there, but it was with pieces of
paper not plastic eggs. "
If we believe that parks and recreation contributes to sustainable
communities and that our actions
matter for the health of our environment, we must step up and act.
" We are the ones holding on to the
values, " says Alvarez. " We can create the messages that we need. "
Richard J. Dolesh is NRPA's Vice President of Strategic
Initiatives (rdolesh@nrpa.org).

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April 2019 - Parks & Recreation

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