...9-29-10, at 6:30 PM at the Paris fire station, the combined selectboards of Norway and Paris, as well as the Norway-Paris Solid Waste board, will meet to discuss the merits of single stream recycling as a form of waste management. Public is invited.
Paris town manager P. Tarr, also currently the chairman of the NPSW board, was wondering at the Paris selectboard meeting Monday, what the public would have to say.
Unfortunately, most folks might know something about solid waste management in general, but certainly far less about single stream recycling in particular.
Generally speaking, what we think of as garbage items would still have to be dealt with in their own way; but recyclable items would have a new way of being handled.
A general understanding of single stream might be, at a rudimentary level of explanation, that all recyclable items would be received into one huge receptacle, then shipped off to a huge sorting plant, sorted by machine, and then disposed of from there; vs. sorting glass from metals from paper, etc, as many of us do individually now, and then disposing of the results in various ways.
Some starter questions might be:
*If there is money to be made from this kind of solid waste management operation, where would it go?
*If, at the magical sorting center, things don't happen to get all sorted properly (there is mention of some things "falling through the cracks") what are the ecological ramifications, historically, with this kind of set up?
*What will happen to the set up we already have, the various components, the workers, the sites, etc?
*Is the Norway-Paris community doing such a poor job of sorting our solid waste that there is need to just put everything in a big bin and ship it off somewhere else to be sorted?
And, lest anyone think this is not about money, because a certain individual said plainly at a combined waste management meeting in spring 2010 that "There's a lot of money to be made in waste management...." let's be certain to double check:
*Who stands to profit?
*Is it only about money?
None of these questions is intended to infer that anything underhanded is afoot. But there is a huge empty space where general public information needs to be happening on this topic; citizens should be very concerned that no commitment is made anywhere until we are fully educated and are in a position to make an informed vote.
