The V.I. has treasure in its trash, so Senators, please don't let Waste Management burn it
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This is an open letter to the Virgin Islands Senators:
As I've dug into the details of some of the V.I. Waste Management Authority's "recycling grants" and the terms that accompany how those grants are carried out, it is no surprise recycling hasn't taken root in the territory.
The practices seem more intended to discourage recycling, than to encourage it.
Not only do grantees make it more costly, and a hassle, for those making use of their "generous offer to provide recycling bins," as compared to just continuing to put waste in the available roadside roll-off dumpsters, but also, the community overall receives no economic benefit from the activity.
It makes absolutely no sense for those issued bins to have to deliver recyclables across town - given the transportation and time costs - to an organization that in turn doesn't put the money made from those materials back into the General Fund. If Waste Management did so, overall costs to the public would be reduced.
Instead of doling out piecemeal grants, Waste Management should have been using that money for organized, centralized resource recovery, and recycling operations that actually put money back into the coffers of the community, like the General Fund.
This is how treasure, for the whole community, can be had from trash:
- Separating and selling glass, aluminum and metals
- Separating organics, composting them into valuable product and selling that product in bags and bulk.
- Not paying Alpine some $137 per ton for that valuable material, because it would wipe out the economic gain from doing it ourselves and cause us to spend up to 100 percent more than what we should per ton.
Government recycling would create local jobs and revenue, and we would not be paying for private jets and luxury junkets for Alpine heads and investors.
I think most of you realize by now that the hideous Alpine proposition would plummet us farther and faster into debt. The EPA knows full well that the landfills will close faster given how the Virgin Islands Recycling Partnership is working toward, or EPA Region 2 would not be paying to facilitate that process.
This is, as they say, a "no brainer."
Please immediately cease considering burning our economic future. We need to set aside unaffordable and non-sustainable concepts.
Please, immediately adopt the resolution in your hands directing Waste Management to work with VIRP.
Please fully support what we're doing through these pilot programs leading to territory-wide, full-scale recycling and composting, and SAVE the $20 million annual "shakedown" so that we have huge amounts left over to invest in solving our energy challenges and future.
- Susan Parten, P.E. Lives on St. Thomas.
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