OK, so maybe St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker wasn't so blunt in his rebuff of Pinellas County's offer to bring curbside recycling to city residents. But he might as well have been.
At last week's Pinellas County Commission worksession, Mike Connors, the city's internal services administrator, told commissioners that the city of St. Pete would rather have the county's curbside recycling money used to reduce tipping fees. (Tipping fees are how much the county charges municipalities to take in the trash at our ever-expanding landfill.)
Of course, this is no surprise to me. Conners told me as much in July. He parroted the same "recycling is bad for the environment" line that Baker has repeated since taking office in 2001. The chief environmental complaint of city officials? The emissions from recycling trucks would cancel out any carbon benefits from recycling.
You can't make this stuff up.
That claim, repeated again and again, was finally called into question at last week's meeting. As the Times reports:
Interim county administrator Fred Marquis asked whether Connors had any evidence to support his claim that dropoff recycling uses less fuel than curbside recycling.
"I'm not able to prove that," Connors said. "But I'm not so sure anyone can disprove that."
But the county can.
They claim curbside recycling would save 4.8 million gallons of gas and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20,900 metric tons. You could argue their statistics are skewed toward their position, but there are two facts St. Pete can't escape from: 1) St. Pete contributes far more to the landfill than any other city and 2) at this rate, the landfill will take just a few decades to fill up.
Once the landfill reaches capacity, all of Pinellas County will pay higher trash fees and see increased emissions, because garbage trucks will have to travel a few hundred miles to the center of the state.
Mayor Baker's resistance to curbside recycling simply doesn't make sense. So, CL readers, please enlighten me on his real reason for opposing curbside recycling?
Bonus Cut: Download a June memo from Pinellas County's solid waste director Robert Hauser rebutting St. Pete officials claims: Pinellas County Solid Waste Director on Curbside Recycling.
UPDATE: Ever the peacemaker, Karl Nurse is proposing a compromise between the city's position and Pinellas County's proposal.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2008.
