The recycling scene? Littered with issues.
Luckily, four local individuals + businesses recently pitched their ideas to improve Chattanooga’s recycling program, which will all soon be piloted with funding from the City of Chattanooga to measure what works in our city.
♻️ The problems
- Through single-stream recycling — which is used in most cities, including Chattanooga — many recycled materials actually end up in the landfill.
- It currently costs ~$600,000 for the city to send just food to the landfill, on top of collection costs.
- Only 1/3 of glass is actually put into recycling bins, and less than half of that gets turned into something new.
- In 2018, ~56% of items going into the MSW landfill could be recycled, but weren’t.
♻️ The pilots
Brian Wright, Green For Good | Brian’s idea comprises 3 smaller partnerships for home, work, and school:
- Home | Utilize Hefty’s orange energy bag program
- Work | Get businesses to partner with organizations that offer rebates for aluminum recycling, and potentially direct those rebates toward Habitat for Humanity
- School | Use the Trex school outreach program that encourages students to collect plastic bags in a fun, competitive way for recycling
Mackenzie Tapley and Jimmy Urciuoli, Green Steps | Update + create new recycling visuals and education outreach, including:
- Informational magnets + stickers for recycling containers and bins
- QR codes that can be updated and will provide education
- Educational workshops on recycling
Chris Greenwood, Olivine Glass | Turning glass crushing into the primary glass recycling system in Chattanooga. Olivine Glass will:
- Crush waste glass into the consistency of sand
- Sell the “sand” — which is currently in extremely high demand for construction — to various businesses
- Work with the city to create concrete from the recycled sand
Norm Lavoie and Michael Ryan, NewTerra Compost | NewTerra, the pitch’s audience choice award winner, focuses on food waste + composting.
- A compost system allowing you to gather food waste that is then composted by NewTerra to use for soil — aka, you don’t have to do the composting yourself
- Since all food waste is going in a separate container, this will cut down the number of garbage trucks needed, fuel used, and amount of waste going into landfills
Poll