Majority support recycling (07/01/08)

The vote is already in. And the results represent a landslide.

Seventy-five percent of Portland households are actively participating in Portland's curbside recycling program.

That fact, in and of itself, ought to be incontrovertible evidence city residents want it to continue.

The real question now is how to get the percentage of participants up from 75 to 100 percent.

Portland board of works member Bob McCreery, a metallurgist, engineer and numbers guy by trade, suggested last week that maybe the recycling program ought to be put on the ballot as a referendum issue. But the participation levels already amount to a referendum.

No further vote should be necessary.

What raised the issue is the rising cost of the program, but the Hosier administration is already taking steps to keep those under control.

City councilman Bill Gibson approached the board of the Jay County Solid Waste District last week to see if the district could help underwrite the costs to continue to make it affordable for Portland.

Gibson didn't get a definitive answer.

But our guess is it will be yes.

What in the world could make more sense than having fees collected from the dumping of trash at the Jay County Landfill help subsidize a program that reduces the amount of waste headed to the landfill?

That may be the best definition ever for poetic justice.

Should the waste district help underwrite the program? Obviously, the answer is yes.

But the real question remains: How to convince more Portland residents to recycle and reduce the waste stream to the landfill?

Doing so is going to take some creative thinking, some incentives and some "nudges" in the right direction. - J.R.

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