Oct. 23--Recycling in Ruidoso is expanding.

Last spring, Village General Services and Solid Waste Director Jeff Kaplan applied for a recycling grant and today 57 residential blue dumpsters are positioned throughout the village, joining 113 set up for commercial accounts.

"We had commercial dumpsters but no real recycling program and many times the material was contaminated with food when people threw garbage there," he said during an interview Wednesday.

He saw good results with businesses where a high percentage of their waste was recyclable material, but residential areas were not being served. The grant bought 57 bins with bear locks. As the village's match, Kaplan is trying to educate the public about recycling, which he's been doing on radio, in the newspaper and with labels on the dumpsters.

The material collected is transported to Green Tree Solid Waste Authority property on Second Street in neighboring Ruidoso Downs, pending the opening of its recycling center east of the city on U.S. 70, possibly before Christmas. The authority was created in 1991 under the name of the Lincoln County Solid Waste Authority. The coalition of the county and four of its five municipalities was created for the collection of garbage and transport to a regional landfill south of Alamogordo.

Ruidoso handles its own garbage and operates a transfer station on Gavilan Canyon Road.

"We will take any of the material on the primary list of Green Tree," he said, except tin or steel cans.

While officially, aluminum cans also are not accepted, Kaplan said he will handle them if someone drops them in a dumpster. He wants to discourage scavengers who might surf the containers looking for aluminum, a potentially dangerous pastime, or those who contaminate material with garbage.

Acceptable items must be clean and include:

--flattened, corrugated cardboard boxes with no wrapping or Styrofoam

--flattened paperboard such as pizza boxes, cereal boxes, soda and beer boxes, laundry soap boxes and dry goods boxes with no plastic or waxed paper liners.

--empty plastic containers, grades 1 through 6, which should be marked on the bottom, and include most soda bottles, milk bottles, water bottles, coffee grounds containers, laundry hygiene containers.

--newspapers or computer paper tied in bundles

--brown paper bags

--bundled magazines and catalogs, slick newspaper inserts

--telephone books, bundled if more than one

Aluminum, steel and tin cans, carpet padding, engine oil and paint can be taken to the Green Tree yard for recycling.

"I don't want plastic bags in my dumpsters, but you can take things over to Green Tree in bags," he said. The list of items not to be dropped in blue dumpsters includes carpet, broken furniture, clothing, dead animals, food, plastic sacks, garden hoses, junk mail, metal coat hangars, construction waste, bubble wrap and pine needles.

"Green Tree is a Materials Recycling Facil-ity," Kaplan explained. "They can be clean MRFs, which only accept segregated materials from separate bins. That costs more in fuel and labor. Green Tree is a dirty MRF and will sort at the recycling center site. It's much more cost effective."

Neither the city nor Green Tree accept glass.

"It's too expensive for manufacturers to take back bottles," Kaplan said. You used to see refunds, but not any more. Glass is heavy and a recycling center has to be close by.

"Some glass can be used in road base, again if the facility is close, but there is no one around here. It just doesn't pay when you have an infinite level of silicone sand available and it's easy to make glass."

Even though glass adds to the waste stream at landfills, eventually it will break down into its original material, he said.

"What people miss is before recycling there is 'reduce and reuse,'" Kaplan said. "When you go to Wal-Mart or another store, carry the cotton bags or ask for recycled paper bags. Plastic bags are made from oil and that's a limited resource and takes a long time to break down. The bags blow at landfills and kill birds who become entangled. You can reuse paper bags and no more trees have to be cut."

Some of his major success comes from the middle and elementary schools, said Kaplan, who is vice chairman of the Lincoln County Recycling Commit-tee headed by Brad Treptow.

"We now have them onboard with recycling," he said. "They use plenty of paper and we've given them extra blue dumpsters. It starts with the custodial crews separating into containers and taking them to the dumpsters."

The village probably is the biggest recycling supplier for Green Tree, he said.

Recycling events also are staged for tires, old Christmas trees and for electronics.

The Spring Lincoln County Electronics Recyc-ling Day s set for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Nov. 8 at Sierra Mall off Mechem Drive in Ruidoso.

Obsolete electronics will be accepted at no charge, including old monitors, circuit boards, laptops and computers.

Old magazines and catalogs also will be collected. The event is sponsored by the Ruidoso Valley Cham-ber of Commerce Keep Ruidoso Beautiful, Green Tree, the Albuquerque Recycling Company, Law-rence Brothers IGA, the village Solid Waste Depart-ment and Schlotzsky's in conjunction with the Nat-ional Recycling Coalition and the New Mexico Recycling Coalition.

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Copyright (c) 2009, Ruidoso News, N.M.

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