Be All You Can Be…Build Sustainable Community Infrastructure

The phone rings and it’s another ex-Boulderite on the line. She’s calling from a small city in Alaska, pleading for help on setting up a simple drop-off center, and asking if I might be interested in traveling to Alaska to help their nonprofit recycling program develop a strategic growth plan. Fifteen minutes later I hang up (after agreeing to help, of course - on their dime), and go back to the task of helping plan two local Grand Openings: one for the new $14 million Boulder County Recycling Center, and the other for EcoCycle’s new Drop-off Center for “Hard-To-Recycle” materials like computers, TVs, and books. (See related stories this issue). It got me thinking about how lucky we are to live here in Boulder County.

Most of us have had the experience of traveling outside Boulder County and being forced to throw perfectly good recyclables into the garbage. We get trapped into being “wasters” when we visit a town without a recycling program.

The common thread here is that if you are an environmentally-minded person, the OPPORTUNITIES exist in Boulder County for you to live in accordance with your conscience. The choice is yours because someone fought to create the infrastructure needed to give you that choice.

The United Kingdom Community Recycling Network recently flew me to Bristol, England to give the keynote speech at their annual conference. They are in awe of our volunteer Block Leader Network and our local “community spirit,” and consider EcoCycle a model for creating community partnerships. The European Union has made some positive strides in environmental protection. But officials are discovering that the downside of government-driven services is that the citizenry has less cause to get organized or volunteer for civic projects. Thus, England has an immediate need for more citizen participation to make recycling work, and that’s why EcoCycle got the call to fly over and help.

While riding the tubes of London and walking the cobblestone streets of Oxford, the concept of sustainable community infrastructure came back to me again. The United Kingdom has been dragged kicking and screaming into the new European Union (EU), and now must adhere to significant new rules pertaining to waste management. In particular, England’s current recycling rate is estimated to be less than 10%, far behind most other EU nations.

The most remarkable and exciting new approach they will have to take is described in the EU policy directive prohibiting the landfilling of all organic waste by 2007. Considering that the typical municipal waste stream is approximately 65% compostable, this is an outstanding example of a rapid and large-scale change on behalf of the environment, and one that will require investing in new sustainable community infrastructure. The lessons for us in this are quite revealing, considering that Boulder County is well behind where it should be when it comes to organics recycling (composting). While I am confident Boulder County will do better on this issue, unfortunately, such big steps forward in the public interest aren’t part of the American political landscape like they are in Europe.

The “ah-ha” in all this is that if we are to be successful in converting the throw-away society into a sustainable one, EcoCycle and others must continually create new opportunities for the community to act according to its conscience. However, building the community infrastructure to accomplish this will take some big money…so what else is new? But look at what we’re all paying now. We spend about $160/year for trash pick-up at our homes, with only $30 of that going to recycling. Just imagine what our community could do if more funds went towards waste diversion than landfilling-we could create a Zero Waste community, with facilities for composting and reuse as well as recycling, and public policies that promote producer responsibility would be just around the corner! Now that’s what I would call sustainable.

So, from Anchorage to England, sustainable community infrastructure is at the forefront. EcoCycle will continue to lead the way here in Boulder County and beyond-and we look forward to your help in making it happen.