During tonight's regular session of the Blacksburg town council, the town plans to pass an endorsement measure for the town government's approval of Sustainable Blacksburg's Downtown Recycling Plan.
Sustainable Blacksburg is a nonprofit organization working to improve environmental awareness and enact green programs in Blacksburg.
"It's part of the consent agenda, which means the measure has no real conflict," town councilwoman Susan Anderson said. "Everybody seemed very favorably impressed with and supportive of it."
Anderson said that while no objections had been voiced so far, the measure was still up for debate.
"Anything that anyone wants to discuss can have that part of the measure pulled off the consent
agenda and set up for later discussion," Anderson said.
The recycling plan is still in the "broad strokes" stage, and Sustainable Blacksburg will work out the details after the council gives its endorsement, said
Blacksburg Vice Mayor Leslie Hager-Smith.
"This is more official than a head nod or a pat on the back."
Anderson added that the first phase must be approved, and then Sustainable Blacksburg will work on finer details of the plan.
"Sustainable Blacksburg didn't want to go into detail without town council's endorsement," Anderson said. "Downtown merchants have already shown their support; once we've passed the consent agenda we'll have formally endorsed the program in concept."
The plan calls for an officially mandated, uniform policy for the downtown commercial district with a single contractor or municipal entity to handle garbage and recyclable materials, said Sustainable Blacksburg Acting Director Pat Bixler.
"(Downtown merchants) recognize there's a lot of material that could be recycled," Bixler said. "At the moment there's no program, but a patchwork of contractors doing this on their own initiative because they think it's the right thing to do."
Hager-Smith and Anderson agreed with Bixler that the measure was fairly uncontroversial and enjoyed broad support from downtown merchants.
The recycling program is a pilot effort, aimed at the downtown commercial district and will start with primarily mixed paper and comingled plastic, metal and glass, Bixler said.
"We recognized that used cooking oil and grease is now a commodity and we recommended that they look at that," Bixler said. "We want to encourage that even though a lot of the local contractors don't have experience with that."
"We're hoping for not only glass and cans, but they'd like to get into food -- composting -- depending on how successful it is in detail. It'd make a wonderful expanded program," Anderson said.
Anderson said the program, if successful, would later expand to all Blacksburg businesses.
Hager-Smith said the proposal was nothing new, but Sustainable Blacksburg had made what was a top-down effort to impose recycling as a bottom-up grassroots effort to implement a recycling regime.
"Some far-sighted town staff had made a similar proposal for recycling when Blacksburg switched to Waste Management from the local contractor," Hager-Smith said. "Sustainable Blacksburg has worked very hard as an independent entity working with local business to make us all greener."
Bixler said working with local business owners and landlords had made a consensus program that had broad appeal.
"We essentially designed a survey of about 75 questions on their patterns of recycling, etc.," Bixler said. "We also contacted other municipalities to learn what they were doing about recycling downtown as well as solid waste and recycling experts."
"Sustainable Blacksburg has taken what was a previously sound proposal that wasn't going anywhere and gotten all that hard-to-earn buy-in," Hager-Smith said. But you really have to laud the merchants they really pulled together on this."
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