Future Collection Days

Even as we were recovering from our overwhelming first one, our Group volunteers and Parish officials began working on a second Collection Day.

The first day's exit survey gave them a lot of ideas, but there were significant logisitical problems to resolve. Again, Diane, Therese, and Brett spent uncountable hours over the next five months working with vendors and reaching out into the community. The last point was most important, because more volunteers were absolutely necessary to make this work.

Our Second Household Hazardous-Waste Collection Day was an unbridled success. Period. Click here for a look at how that went.

Now, the "What about this idea?" idea is evolving in two directions: The Northshore Community's response to our first two efforts is close to convincing the Parish that these must be regular events the public can plan around and rely on. However, there is no provision in the Parish budget for this! If you think management of hazardous houseold waste should be an important part of our local government's work, please contact Parish President Kevin Davis or your local Parish Councilman or the Parish Department of Environmental Services.

Also....

Parish-Wide Recycling

Our exit survey at the Second Collection Day asked everyone if they were interested in a Parish-wide program, and their overwhelming answer was "Yes!" And, most respondants said they were willing to pay a nominal additional fee to get that to happen.

While recycling is not the same as hazardous-waste collection, it represents the other half of the same problem: What to do with the detritus of our routine lives to prevent it from flowing into and spoiling the Northshore environment we all love?

The answer must be a "system", a way to separate the materials that will reasonably incinerate or decompose in landfills from those that will not, and then separate the latter into the toxic and recoverable groups -- and then provide mechanisms for processing all three.

Creating regularly scheduled Household Hazardous-Waste Collection Days will be a big step, but a parallel recycling program will be just as important. Many residents think they have one now, but that may not be true! Curbside collection is just the beginning. Without cost-effective channels to process the materials, collectors are forced to simply dump the recycleables with the garbage in landfills. This is happening more than most Northshore residents think!

Changing this will not be easy. Presently, municipalities contract for collection in incorporated areas, and individuals act independently elsewhere. Redesigning and implementing a Parish-wide system may be even more difficult than recent largely unsuccessful attempts at regional planning. Still, people moving here from other parts of the country are astonished at our lack of these services, and -- sooner or later -- we must join the rest of the country -- or we'll lose what Katrina left for us to enjoy.

It all comes down to our commitments, what we are willing to do to save what we have.

In the meantime, there's a printable list of recycling resources in our area here, and we have an interactive recycling web page here.