“Sixteen Tons And What Do You Get?” Actually, more than twice that!

Saturday, October 28th, 2006: A cool clear crystal-bright we-have-‘em-only-a-couple-times-a-year morning, and in three hours 500 cars, trucks, and trailers passed through the parking lot at the Parish Administrative Complex on Koop Drive!

There was one caged trailer just for tires, and it was filled!

This was the explosive result of a six-month effort by Sierrans Diane Casteel, Therese Kwiecien, and Linda Beall, with Brett Henry and other officials from the St. Tammany Parish Department of Environmental Services. What began with an idea brought up at a Honey Island Group meeting grew through many meetings and late nights and uncountable phone calls trying to obtain the required permits, line up vendors to receive the materials, and get the word out to the community.

Help in advertising the event came from a spectrum of organizations, community groups and individuals. Girl Scout Troops handed out fliers and collected materials which they pooled and brought to the collection day. The St. Tammany Parish Library distributed fliers to all of its branches. The Northlake Nature Center, Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, Junior League of Greater Covington, League of Women Voters, Keep Mandeville Beautiful, Slidell Chamber of Commerce, and numerous garden clubs, churches, private schools, homeowners and neighborhood associations all announced the event at their meetings or placed notices in their newsletters.

Some area businesses kept a stack of advertising fliers available for their customers. Master Gardeners and the County Agricultural Extension Office handed out fliers at the Parish Fair. The Town of Abita Springs placed notices on their water bills, and both the Mandeville Community Market and Covington Farmers Market allowed volunteers to hand out fliers. The City of Mandeville helped to sponsor a poster contest among St. Tammany Parish schools, and this served both to advertise this opportunity in the community and to educate young people regarding the hazards of common household products and the responsibility to dispose of them properly.

• Rineco, for paint
• Lamp Environmental Industries (LEI) for e-waste, light bulbs and others
• Colt, Inc for tires
• Office Depot, for inkjet and toner cartridges

Still, as the sun rose on Collection Day, no one had any idea what to expect. Volunteers from the Group, the Kiwanis Club, and Southeastern Louisiana University received tee shirts, donuts and coffee (courtesy of the Parish), and a safety briefing from the Fire Department, and shortly before 9:00am the gates opened. Within minutes, the line of cars snaked out of the parking lot, up Koop Drive, and north and south on LA59, even out on to Interstate 12 a half mile away.

All the paint cans had to be loaded onto pallets and then into tractor trailers -- a huge job!

Cars pulled forward in groups of three or four, and volunteers sprinted to each, unloading rusty paint cans, computers and monitors, televisions, and automobile tires, batteries, engine oil, and antifreeze – first out of the vehicles, then off to the staging areas where each item could be evaluated, sorted, and finally loaded into trucks for hauling away. Very quickly the sheer volume began to overwhelm everyone, and the evaluating and sorting gave way to “Find some place for this! Any place!!” People driving through reported waiting in line for an hour and that the line stretched north to Dog Pound Road and east along the Interstate almost to Lacombe, four and ten miles away! Still, with almost no exceptions, the drivers’ moods were wonderful. People who had been forced to devote virtually their entire Saturday morning to this project bubbled with enthusiasm and gratitude, even those with items we couldn’t accept.

But, as the volunteers unloaded, everyone kept looking at the growing piles of materials that still had to be organized and cleared away. As the scheduled cutoff time of 12:00noon approached, it became obvious that some folks would be turned away. When that happened, we were told by Sheriff’s personnel as many as 250 vehicles were still in line! Everyone felt terrible about this, but with the work less than half done, there was just no alternative.

The volume of e-waste was. . . overwhelming!

The volunteers spent the entire afternoon and into the evening sorting and stacking onto pallets and loading into trucks. Some of the sorer backs called it a day starting at 5:30, and some heartier souls made it through to 8:00 and a little later. Some of the Parish employees couldn’t get away until 10:00pm!

To give a benchmark to the day, Greg Gorden, the Director of the Parish’s Department of Environmental Services, said they had allowed for ten barrels of paint; by mid to late afternoon, there were eighty! LEI had originally brought in one trailer; during the afternoon they brought in two more, both larger than the first!

By anyone and everyone’s definitions, St. Tammany’s First Household Hazardous-Waste Collection Day was an off-the-scale success. The cloud over the silver lining was that we had to turn away so many vehicles. It seemed certain that we needed to do this once every six months or so, and the Group immediately began collecting what we learned this first time.

This was a true “community service”: a service from the community to the community! Let's do it again!!