May 29, 2008

NM Recycling Conference, June 3-4, Update

8 CEU Credits Available for Attending Conference

The New Mexico Environment Department will grant up to 8 CEU credits for attending the full NM Recycling Conference. Attendees that are certified operators of landfills, transfer stations, recycling facilities, or composting facilities are eligible.

Session Spotlights:

Innovations in Drop-Off Programs

Hear about the City of Rio Rancho's twice annual collection events, that literally collect just about everything recyclable except the kitchen sink. EcoCycle in Boulder uses the CHARM model, a community drop-off center that accepts not only the traditional recyclables but hard-to-recycle items from fire extinguishers to books.

State Funding for Recycling Projects

Discover the various state grant and loan programs to support recycling, as well as learn about successful capital outlay requirements for the purchase of recycling equipment.

Outreach Tools

Getting the word out about recycling is one of our greatest challenges. Chandra Weaver brings a video produced to educate schools and residents about how a recycling sorting center works. Sage Deon talks about outreach to tribal communities. Lisa Skumatz brings social marketing research from around the US, highlighting best practices in reaching your audience.

Pay-As-You-Throw: Setting Variable Rates for More Recycling

Another tactic for raising recycling rates and encouraging people to waste less is Pay-As-You-Throw aka PAYT. Lisa Skumatz and David Freeman are working with EPA to promote more PAYT models in local communities. Terry Timme will present on NM's only PAYT program, how the fee structure works and the effect they have seen.

Setting Up Recycling in the Hospitality Industry

(A special in-depth workshop targeting hotels and restaurants)

Being able to advertise that a hotel or restaurant is green is becoming more and more important these days. Hotels are receiving clauses in their contracts requiring on-site recycling and food scrap collection. This workshop will bring best practices, waste audits, experts from the set-up side to the hauling side, as well as properties that have installed a successful recycling program. This session open to all  conference attendees as well.

Details about each of the conference break-out sessions have been posted online at http://www.recyclenewmexico.com/Conference08_Program.htm.

You Can Still Register!

Register online at www.recyclenewmexico.com/conference08.htm

Many Thanks to our Conference Sponsors

New Mexico Environment Department: Solid Waste Bureau; Dex; PNM Resources: Intel; SBM Site Services; Livingry Fund of Tides Foundation; Waste Management Recycle America; Associated General Contractors: NM Building Branch; Gordon Environmental; NM Department of Transportation; Plastics Division - American Chemistry Council; Solid Waste Association of North America - NM RoadRunner Chapter; Waste Connections/Camino Real Recycling Center; Can Manufacturers Institute; Durango McKinley Paper Company; Steel Recycling Institute; UNICOR/Federal Prison Industries; Zia Engineering and Environmental Consultants; Whole Foods and Earthstone.

New Member Spotlight: Green Planet Recycling

On January 1st, 2008 Green Planet Recycling in Albuquerque, NM, began accepting used carpet and pad.  Their primary goal is to alleviate the tremendous strain on our landfills.  With the help of concerned and forward thinking, local retailers they are already beginning to accomplish this. Already they have recycled over 700,000 lbs of carpet and padding.  The used pad is baled and shipped to manufactures and processed into new pad.  About 1/3 of the used carpet enters the carpet-to-carpet recycling program with the remaining 2/3 being used in the manufacture of parking barriers, Geo-textiles, lumber alternatives, fiberboard, sod re-inforcement and concrete additives. Carpet recycling is in its infancy, but new and exciting uses are being found. It is their hope that eventually 100% of all carpet in New Mexico will be recycled into useful products.

Green Planet Recycling can accept carpet at their facility, 2604 Princeton NE Bldg C, in Albuquerque.
 
For more information you can contact Charles Greenwoood at (505) 837-1950 or STELLARIVERA30@MSN.COM


Composting Butcher Waste and Livestock Mortality Workshop - June 17

The NM Environment Department: Solid Waste Bureau (NMED:SWB) is hosting a workshop aimed at animal processing businesses in order to share in-depth information on the value of composting the waste rather than landfilling it. NMED: SWB Bureau Chief Auralie Ashley-Marx, a mortality composting expert, will teach the full day workshop. The class is free and will be held in Taos.

Click here to view detailed brochure.

Register with Greg Baker, NMED: SWB, greg.baker@state.nm.us or call 505-827-2780

Food Residuals Collection Service Launched in Albuquerque

Beginning in May 2008, Soilutions, Inc will offer a collection service to any generator of small volumes of food waste. Soilutions, a greenwaste recycler and compost manufacturer in the south valley of Albuquerque, has been a high quality composter for over 10 years. They accept material from residents, farmers, landscapers, as well as national and local governmental entities. “There were just too many restaurants and coffee shops asking us to do it. We finally decided that we couldn’t afford not to”, remarked Jim Brooks of Soilutions.

Soilutions will provide wheeled 64-gallon carts to any business that doesn’t generate enough organics to warrant a compactor but still wants to see their waste handled responsibly. For a very small fee, the container will be picked up on a regular schedule determined by the generator. The cart will be exchanged for an empty clean container. The container size has a low profile in the commercial kitchen and is easy to maneuver. Material collected by the service will be composted and sold as high grade compost.

This service is also perfect for large volume producers that do not have the building space to accommodate a larger, more economical compactor or other organics producers, such as horseman. It can also be tailored to special events. Although the program is up and running, the “Grand Unveiling” of the service will occur June 3-4 2008 at the NM Recycling Conference.

Historic Hotel Is Undergoing a Green Renovation, and Everything Needs a New Life

By Susan Stiger
Of the Journal, May 23, 2008
    SPARE CHANGE: La Posada de Albuquerque is in pieces these days as it undergoes an extensive, and green, remodel. Parts of the 1930s Downtown hotel have become nylon, wood pellets, furniture and the underbelly of a road. And there may just be something left to come to your house— a porcelain sink, a tin light fixture or an original door.
    Goodman Realty Group, which owns the hotel, is going for a LEED— Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design— certificate for the project at 125 Second SW. So Darin Sand, former assistant to company CEO Gary Goodman, became a LEED-certified professional, in charge of recycling, reusing and relocating. Sand, a man for whom "landfill" is synonymous with failure, has to recycle at least 75 percent of everything that's taken out of the hotel to earn the certificate.
    Education was his first step— studying and testing to become an accredited professional in the eyes of the U.S. Green Building Council. That finished, he started keeping records, a whole binder full of documentation on his efforts, those that worked and those that didn't. No toilet's been too lowly, no bathtub too cumbersome for the promise of a new life.
    "All tin lighting is for sale, chandeliers from the lobby, original doors, miscellaneous furniture that's not original, vintage (porcelain) sinks," Sand said.
    Tin lighting— none of it original to the hotel— ranges from the $5 to $10 range for small pieces (in good supply) to $150 for corridor lights (about 20 left) to $600 and $800 for small and large chandeliers (about 12). Miscellaneous furniture includes headboards, $10 to $20, lamps, magazine racks, chairs, end tables and art from the hotel rooms, all variously priced. Vintage pedestal sinks— about 15— are going for $100 (fixtures are not original). Close to 200 window shutters are going for $25 each. If you're interested, call 881-0100.
    The landfill will never know what it's missing. Old wood worthy of a carpenter has become antique-style furniture, lesser wood, stove pellets; tons of carpet have become fiber or padding; bathtubs and some sinks are to become sculpture. Maybe some of this stuff— not the toilets or tubs— will end up in another Goodman Realty project— Winrock Center, which, by the way, they're still not talking about.
   
First Hilton here
    La Posada began as a Hilton Hotel in 1939, the first Conrad Hilton built here, despite his home ties to New Mexico. The remodel has been lengthy, closing the hotel in December 2005. If all goes according to plan, it may reopen this year, still rooted in Albuquerque's 1930s history but not looking like a stale grand dame.
    The formerly 114-room hotel is being overhauled to 107 rooms, which means expanding the tiny bathrooms. Evidently, the porcelain-over-cast-iron tubs were installed before the final walls of those bathrooms were put up, because there was just no getting them out through the doorways.
    "The tubs actually busted up pretty easily," said Sand. "With the first few, we cut the wall out and drug out the tubs."
    What do you do with 114 porcelain-over-cast-iron tubs? You keep the best ones to reuse, of course. But once everything was ripped out, Sand was left with 75 tubs weighing 350 pounds each, along with 35 cast-iron sinks— 12.21 tons of bathroom fixtures— that had seen a lot of tooth brushing and hair washing. After all those years of service, they deserved commemoration.
    And as it happened, after a phone call here and a lead there and a suggestion over there, Sand discovered his answer right here in New Mexico. Specifically, Tucumcari.
    Tucumcari's Mesalands Community College has a renowned sculpture program that holds yearly cast-iron pourings. "Many of the pieces cast here have been in international shows," said D'Jean Jawrunner, of the fine art faculty. Just when it seemed the tub and sink portion of Sand's project couldn't get any easier, it did.
    Bathtubs don't fly after all, and it's 176 miles to Tucumcari. With the kind of luck that should be reserved for buying lottery tickets, Sand discovered Mesalands has another handy program: truck driving. Three students, a teacher and a flat bed fitted with sides headed to Albuquerque to load up the tubs. They became molten cast iron March 14 in the school's annual cast-iron pour.
    The porcelain toilets had a less glorious reincarnation.
    "We called around the country, from New York to California to Washington state looking for people who would take porcelain," said Sand. "It's interesting who you talk to and how helpful they can be."
    Someone suggested using the porcelain to make bricks, but it would make white bricks, and there didn't seem to be much call for those here. Not so in Texas, where Sand did find one suitable brick maker— but it was right down the street from a toilet manufacturer. Many phone calls and dead ends later, 8,020 pounds of ground-up toilets are going underfoot— way underfoot— at Goodman's property, the base for a road he's building to his horse pasture. Probably as close as a horse gets to a toilet.
   
Home for the carpet
    Too bad he couldn't take the 31,321 pounds of carpet.
    A lot of carpet is recycled in Georgia— too many miles to cover in the name of environmental consciousness. Los Angeles proved to be the greenest approach Sand could find. Just to push his luck, he asked Mesalands if its trucking students could use more experience. Because it's a nonprofit, the school hauled the carpet for free and Goodman Realty Group gave it a $2,500 donation.
    But Mesalands' biggest score came from the hotel bathrooms. You don't come across 12 tons of free cast iron every day. To thank La Posada, art students are making a cast-iron sculpture for the hotel lobby.
    If you have some Spare Change— business or money news you're not likely to see elsewhere in the paper— please e-mail sstiger@abqjournal.com or call 823-3820.
    For Sale
    Interested in owning a remnant of La Posada de Albuquerque? Built by Conrad Hilton, the downtown hotel dates back to 1939. Some items are original to the hotel; some are not. Call 881-0100 for information on everything from tin lighting to magazine racks to headboards to pedestal sinks.

Ugly Necklace Contest Celebrates Recycled Material 

Local artist Kimberly Dods is one of ten finalists from around the world in the 6^th Annual 2008 Ugly Necklace Contest – a jewelry design contest with a twist. The contest draws the jewelry designer into an alternative universe where artists are required to violate the principals of design to create ugly necklaces. It's not easy to do. Ms. Dods’ necklace is handmade from 100% recycled materials.

Starting May 20^th 2008, 25% of the judge’s decision will be based on on-line voting. Ms. Dods urges all New Mexicans to vote on her necklace at www.landofodds.com/store/ugly6contest.htm. (Remember, thumbs up are good—they mean ugly.)

Measure Your Community's Sustainability

Railroad Cars and Locomotives for Sale and Lease

In these expensive transportation times, I thought it would be helpful to list a resource for rail cars to move recycling about.

WIH Resource Group brokers railcars and locomotives. Purchase prices start at $21,000 per car or leases as low at $350/mo. For more information call 480-241-9994 or admin@wihrg.com

Plan to Forge E-Waste Bill Stalls With Resignation of Key Proponent

A bipartisan plan to forge a national policy for electronic waste that would require EPA to ban land-disposal of the waste has stalled after its chief proponent, Rep. Albert Wynn (D-MD), resigned his chairmanship of a key House environmental subcommittee last month. The plan as detailed in a concept paper had already drawn criticism from EPA, states, industry and environmental groups. It now appears that it will take a year or more to for an e-waste bill to pass Congress. A number of states have enacted their own programs for dealing with e-waste. The e-waste plan was meant to meld the disjointed patchwork of state measures into a consistent federal program. The concept paper calls for amending the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act to include a subtitle to cover e-waste, advocates banning land disposal of e-waste, seeks EPA oversight for minimum standards for state programs and requires greater notification and consent for the export of e-waste to foreign ports...Read More »

Recycling Commodity Prices

*Please note that this a sample of what is being offered in New Mexico for certain commodities.

Recycling Tidbits

Community E-Waste Set-Up Guide

"Setting Up & Operating Electronics Recycling/Reuse Programs: A Manual for Municipalities & Counties which is on their web page at http://www.nerc.org/documents/survey/index.html

HOW TO READ LABELS ON PLASTIC CONTAINERS & PRODUCTS
Unfortunately, the average consumer is buying more and more products packaged in plastic. It's getting harder and harder to find non-plastic containers. So what should the educated consumer do? Obviously, buying products packaged in tin, glass or aluminum increases recyclability and reduces toxins like BPA in our diets. But if you have to buy plastic, what's the best option? We all know those little numbers on plastic products identify the specific type of plastic. But which ones are less toxic? Which ones are really getting recycled as compared to those that get thrown into the bins destined for the waste dump or underdeveloped countries?  Learn more by using this handy guide: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_11653.cfm

Calendar

**June 3-4, 2008 New Mexico Recycling Conference, Albuquerque

**July 11, NMRC Board Meeting, Bernalillo County, 11 AM. RSVP to english@recyclenewmexico.com

**September 18, NMRC Board Meeting, Los Alamos, 11 AM. RSVP to english@recyclenewmexico.com

**September 20-24, National Recycling Coalition Congress, Pittsburgh, PA. www.nrc-recycle.org

**November 6-7, NMRC Board Retreat, Sevilleta, time TBA. RSVP to english@recyclenewmexico.com

If you have questions about any of the above information or have articles for future Recycling Scraps, please e-mail or call me. 

English Bird

Executive Director

New Mexico Recycling Coalition

PO Box 24364, Santa Fe, NM 87502

english@recyclenewmexico.com

(505) 983-4470

Fax (505) 466-6266