I have some wishes for the Amarillo City Council candidates to ponder as they campaign across the city in search of votes … and I likely will reveal some of them in this blogĀ during the course of the campaign.
Here’s one that I think needs City Hall’s attention: recycling.
The idea of reusing our products seems to be on no one’s radar. Plastic jugs, bottles and cans, newsprint? Pfftt! Just toss it into the trash can, let the big ol’ trucks pick ’em and haul it all of to the dump.
The city used to place Dumpsters at locations around town. You could toss newsprint — such as old newspapers — into them. The Dumpsters lasted some time, then the city yanked them away. Why? Too many residents were just tossing run-of-the-mill garbage into these recycling bins. It created a headache for solid waste disposal crews, so the city said “to hell with it” and surrendered. It gave up.
I haven’t heard much debate of any kind about the City Council campaign, at least not yet. I hope to hear from some of the candidates for council member and for mayor to discuss the issue of recycling.
I would love to hear how the city could institute a curbside recycling program for residents. This discussion just doesn’t resonate with anyone, it seems.
My wife and I came here from Beaumont, a city of about 120,000 residentsĀ near the Gulf Coast. Beaumont isn’t known as an environmentally conscious community. Yet forĀ years it ran a curbside recycling program where residents could fill bins with plastic products, glassware and newsprint; we would put the bins along the street in front of our homes and recyclers would pick them to, um, recycle them.
My understanding is that the program lost some of its steam after we left.
All five City Council seats are up for election on May 6. Is there any notion out there among one or more of the candidates about whether there’s any possibility of establishing a recycling mindset in our fair city?