Waste management - A College Park recycling truck
Among other things, CB-87 increases the County’s recycling goals, revives and expands the membership of Solid Waste Commission and tasks it with recycling and resource management, tightens requirements and enforcement in business and multi-family sectors, removes plastic bags from yard waste and requires annual recycling reports from DER. The bill had the support of DER.
The bill aims to raise County’s recycling goal to 45% by 2015, 55% by 2018 and 60% by 2020.
College Park residents Suchitra Balachandran & Greg Smith (of Community Research group) have been active in lobbying County Council members to pass the bill. Congratulations to both for this achievement.
“Although the City of College Park is self sufficient in trash and recycling pickup and yard waste composting, we are a small entity and having the County expand its goals will allow us to piggy back on their mandates and opportunities. For example, the county-wide mandate on business recycling imposed by this bill should cause College Park’s businesses to be more receptive to outreach from the City’s business recycling task force.” – Ms. Balachandran writes.
Also thanks are due to Council Members Eric Olson and Mary Lehman who championed this bill and to their staff Dannielle Glaros and Matt Dernoga who crafted the language and shepherded the process. Thanks too to all groups who signed on to the testimony.