Earthblog

or “Bike Wheels, Bottle Caps, and Karma’’
Written by Charlie Malone
Tuesday, 05 October 2010

Rob Martin from Rob’s Bike says “only 30% of the glass dropped into co-mingled recycling actually gets recycled.” Susie Gordon, Senior Environmental Planner for the city says, “that’s on a good day”. It’s often much less.

As we shuffle our recyclables out to the curb and the haulers shift, dump and transport it all, the glass breaks down beyond recovery; it gets embedded in paper, making the paper harder to recycle. Much of the glass ends up in the landfill helping to separate the rest our waste. This is a poor resting place for a recyclable, finite, natural resource. Susie reminds me “glass is endlessly recyclable; we can melt it down over and over again.”

An illusion bursts here, like a balloon punctured with a sharp shard of glass. Those neat, tidy bins with our rinsed beer bottles and plastic juice containers, our carefully flattened cereal boxes waiting outside our homes let us feel good about doing such a simple thing for the environment. And yet more than 70% of that glass still finds its way to the landfill.

Susie Gordon says when the city moved to a single-stream recycling program they knew “these downsides would exist.” In order to increase the volume of recoverable materials, to save more stuff from the landfill, the city has to cater to us, and our laziness. Asking us to sort our recycling just doesn’t work. It’s too hard for us.

This isn’t okay for Rob Martin, he already gathers glass from around a dozen local restaurants and bars and hauls it on his bike. He says, “I don’t know why I think this way, hauling heavy stuff on a bike, anyway it’s good, steady work.” Since the brown-bottle program started Rob says, “in five years I’ve hauled 470,000 pounds of glass from old town with that little trailer and these skinny legs.” He’s willing to haul more to keep fuel-burning trucks off the road and out of the line of idling traffic at the landfill.

Right now, he’s exploring ways to partner with Gallegos Sanitation to set up residential glass drop-off points and ways to collect sorted glass.  Rob says, “the old town area is pretty progressive and people want to do the right thing so we educate them and tell them what’s going on they’d be willing to separate their glass and keep another truck off the streets by having it picked up with bikes.” We’re lucky in Fort Collins to have companies who are willing to take a risk and support projects like this. Rob says, “I was kind of thinking of doing it on my own but working with an established trash company, now that makes more sense.” Gallegos likes the idea, New Belgium wants to help with some incentives.

Rob’s been working to help with recycling at Rams football games. He’s been looking at collecting after the tailgating wraps up by “putting out the different recycling bins at the CSU games and once the game starts having the bike go around and pick it all up.” Part of this would also allow them to show the bike on the Jumbotron and broadcast an educational message.

It doesn’t stop at bottles for Rob. “I’m collecting compost, really beautiful food waste,” he says, “about 60-70lbs every other day at Austin’s.” Susie Gordon was awarded stimulus money to partnered up with CSU to get this project going and hopefully it will keep growing.

For Rob and his bike courier service to keep growing and be able to take on these kinds of projects he needs some help. He needs to get his regular courier work going more, moving real estate signs and other not-so-heavy hauling. He says, “I need to get some capital. I need a little help; to take a step back and pull the strings more. I need to go after some of the more lucrative business for my bike, but to be quite honest I love the recycling. I love the possibility of the glass collecting program. If I were really smart, what I could do is make it a model nationally, be bigger instead of being a laborer working 40-50 hours. To dream really big and make it national model.”

Unfortunately, Rob is finding he needs to work smarter not harder. He leaves me with a joke summing up the practical side of his philanthropy: “What’s the difference between a large pizza and a bike courier?...A large pizza can feed a family of four.” Ta dump zing. If it’s funny it’s because it’s sad. I can only let out a sort of desperate laugh.

People like Rob Martin and Susie Gordon make, or try to make, a living by serving us and taking care of the land. It isn’t always easy to make ends meet when you’re pioneering programs and learning as you go.

It’s been a year since the city launched the “Collection Karma” program, giving us the option to separate our bottles and ensure nearly 100% capture. The program asks, “What's Your Bottle Karma?” There are drop off points for glass around city where nearly 100% comes back to us as new bottles. There’s still room to do better.

We expect a lot of our local government and a lot less from ourselves. There’s a false sense of what happens to single-stream waste and that allows us to be lazy. We need to keep in mind that when something like single-stream waste seems to ask so little of us that there’s probably a downside. Undeniably, it‘s a good program but I didn’t bother to understand how it works. It’s so easy to think, “Great, that’s easy.” This should always be a red flag. Perhaps more importantly, it shouldn’t be that the determining factor for the success or failure of a well-intentioned program hinges on how little it asks of us.

Talking to Susie Gordon and Rob Martin is great because I leave with the antithesis of environmental gloom and doom. In fact it’s really clear what I can do. Little things like separating my glass and taking it to the Rivendell Recycling Center, the Larimer County Landfill, or even to Chipper’s on Horsetooth. I can participate in other programs the city offers like CFL recycling, or the Leaf Exchange. It’s harder to know how to make good use of a scarce resource like Rob’s Bike. I feel I need to tell people about his awesome work, recommend him to everyone, pressure businesses to take advantage of his services, and keep encouraging the city to partner with him.

We’re lucky in Fort Collins to have what seems like more community leaders like Rob and Susie, and progressive companies like Austin’s, Chipper’s, Gallegos and New Belgium, per capita than other places. These people have a faith in us that I hope to live up to. Like Rob says, “I really think if you understand the reason, simple education is the answer. People want to do the right thing.”

For more information on the program and drop-off point visit:
http://www.fcgov.com/recycling/
http://www.fcgov.com/recycling/

For more information on Rob’s Bike visit:
http://www.robsbike.com/