• NMRC Annual Meeting & One-Day Recycling Training - June 7th Register Today!
• 2017 Recycling & Composting Certification Courses - Register Today!
• 2017 Legislative Session Wrap Up
• City of Santa Fe's Delivers Their New Curbside Recycling Carts 
• Recycle Your Damaged Clothes, Shoes, and Other Textiles at Goodwill Stores
• Commodity Pricing
• Recycling News from New Mexico
• Recycling News from The Nation

NMRC Annual Meeting & One-Day Recycling Training - June 7th Register Today!

June 7, 2017 8:30-4:00
NMRC will be hosting its 2017 Annual Meeting and Recycling Training on June 7th from 8:00-4:00 at the Albuquerque Museum (2000 Mountain NW), Ventana Salon.  In "non-conference" years, NMRC hosts a one day annual meeting and recycling training.  

This is your chance in 2017 to gather with your recycling and composting peers, learn about best practices in recycling and get inspired to help New Mexico to value waste as a resource.  CEU credits will be offered.  Registration is open so REGISTER TODAY!

Join your recycling and composting peers to learn about the following exciting topics:

• NM State of Recycling and Program Updates - Neal Denton, New Mexico Environment Department: Solid Waste Bureau
• Update on Rural Recycling in New Mexico - 5 Years of Hub and Spoke - Sarah Pierpont, NMRC
•  Los Alamos County’s Road Map for Curbside Brush Collections - Angelica Gurule, Environmental Services Manager & John Bliss, Los Alamos County - Environmental Sustainability Board Chair
• Glass Recycling Options, Processing and Markets: Santa Fe and Las Cruces Case Studies - Danita Boettner, Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency & Keysha Burton, South Central Solid Waste Authority
• Silver City’s Upgraded Collection Program - Terry Timme, Planner, Recycling and Special Projects, Town of Silver City Office of Sustainability
• A Meeting of Minds: Solid Waste Managers Panel Discussion – Randall Kippenbrock, Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency, Billy Moore (pending confirmation), North West New Mexico Regional Solid Waste Authority, Jill Holbert, City of Albuquerque Solid Waste Department and Lonnie Duncan (pending confirmation), Operations Manager San Juan Landfill/Four Corners Regional EcoCenter Waste Management

ALL PROFESSIONALS INVITED!! You do not have to be a NMRC member to attend!

$100 members, $175 non-members (lunch provided)
($25 discount for groups of 3 or more from same community/entity)

2017 Recycling & Composting Certification Courses - Register Today!

The New Mexico Environment Department: Solid Waste Bureau (NMED:SWB), in partnership with NMRC, hosts two recycling and two compost facility operators certification courses each year.  The 2017 dates and locations have been set and registration is now open. LEARN MORE AND REGISTER HERE!

NMRC, SWANA and NMED Partner to Host 3 day Collection Center Training - Aug 22-24

2017 Legislative Session Wrap Up

The 2017 sixty-day legislative session ends on Saturday, March 18th.  The New Mexico Recycling Coalition has tracked the following pieces of legislation relating to Recycling and Solid Waste. 

House Bill 452 FY 2017 Funds Transfer - As introduced the bill would have taken, "one hundred seventy thousand eight hundred dollars ($170,800) from the solid waste facility grant fund."  NMRC submitted a letter of opposition to the House Appropriations and Finance Committee and the Bill Sponsor and reached out to members to oppose bill.  NMRC noted that the emergency clause of this piece of legislation would directly and negatively impact current grantees with outstanding solid waste grant funded projects.  This includes Estancia Valley Solid Waste Authority, Catron County and the City of Raton.  The City of Raton has been awarded money to install a groundwater monitoring well at a closed landfill and conducting groundwater monitoring. Estancia Valley Solid Waste Authority is preparing a permit application for a construction and demolition landfill and asbestos monofill cells at the existing Town of Vaughn Landfill, and Catron County is conducting a survey of the Pie Town Landfill. 

The House Appropriations and Finance Committee amended the amount to be taken from the solid waste facility grant fund from $170,800 to $85,000. Current Location is the House Appropriations and Finance Committee after receiving House Floor Amendments.  

Senate Memorial 71 Recycling Product Stewardship Programs - NMRC worked with Senator Steinborn to create Senate Memorial 71, which tasks the New Mexico Recycling Coalition with creating a product stewardship advisory group to study necessary steps to implement product stewardship programs in New Mexico.  Creation of such an advisory group is the result of recommendations from 2013 House Memorial 56 and 2014 House Memorial 51 and would involve industry and government stakeholders to lay the path for a product stewardship bill that also incorporates economic development.  

The Senate Rules Committee and the Senate Conservation Committee both passed the Memorial and its current location is on the Senate floor.  It's not known if the Senate will take a vote on it to pass it before the March 18th deadline or not.

Senate Memorial 83 Expedite Recycling Facility Permitting - While this title sounds great, NMRC submitted a letter of opposition, attended committee meetings and reached out to members to oppose SM83, which died in the Senate Conservation Committee.  The memorial sought to have, "the NM Economic Development Department and the NM Department of Environment cooperate in expediting the permitting process for FGM3-Soukous Recycling and 'Waste to Energy' facilities in New Mexico."  The legitimacy of the technology aside, NMRC did not think it fair to have one company receive preferential treatment and that this would skirt the established permitting procedures outlined in the Solid Waste Act.   The Senate Rules Committee removed the word "expediting" from the memorial.  NMRC remained opposed because following this amendment it appeared to be a memorial simply asking the Environment Department to do its job of permitting facilities.  

Senate Bill 113 Reduce Appropriations & Transfer Funds - As introduced Senate Bill 113 would have taken $635,100 from the current Recycling and Illegal Dumping (RAID) grants and transfer the funds to the state's general fund.  As introduced, this would have left RAID funded communities stuck with unpaid bills.  NMRC opposed the bill and many communities funded through current RAID grants also voiced their opposition.  The final bill that was signed by the governor on Janurary 31, 2017 took $200,000 from the RAID fund and the New Mexico Environment Department: Solid Waste Bureau is generously covering this $200,000 out of their administrative budget to ensure that all current RAID-funded grants can continue as planned. 

City of Santa Fe's Delivers Their New Curbside Recycling Carts 

From the Santa Fe Reporter by By Steven Hsieh - Armando Gabaldon still remembers hauling loads of garbage by hand and emptying smelly bins one by one, hundreds of times a day, when he worked as an operator for the city’s waste division.

All that changed about ten years ago, when Santa Fe switched to an automated system for solid waste. These days, garbage trucks employ a mechanical arm to dump garbage from curbside to receptacle, saving time, knees and backs.

In the coming weeks, the city will make the same upgrade for recycling.

Since March 13, a contractor called Cascade has been delivering to city residents roughly 30,000 64-gallon recycling bins, partially funded through a grant with Recycling Partnerships, a nonprofit. The new carts replace the flimsy, blue, box-like containers currently used to separate plastics, cardboard, aluminum and glass.

With the new carts, residents can toss out all their recyclables together without separating by type—except glass. When the city rolls out its fleet of seven new recycling trucks, operators will stop accepting glass on their daily pickups. Residents who want to recycle glass must personally deliver it to one of four dropoff spots. (Those locations are at 1142 Siler Road, 202 Murales Road, 4009 Lucia Lane and the Buckman Road Recycling and Transfer Station, better known as BuRRT.) 

For Gabaldon, now a recycling supervisor, it’s about damn time. Santa Fe lags behind other jurisdictions, including Albuquerque, which made the switch to automated recycling pickup in 2013. Since then, Albuquerque has more than doubled its quantity of recycled materials. “We’re still wearing swords and body armor. We’re in the dark ages,” Gabaldon says. “We’re so far behind it’s not even funny.”

The city seems to have a sense of humor about its behind-on-the-times approach to recycling. “The 90’s called. They want their bin back,” reads a print ad campaign.

On a recent Monday morning, SFR sat with Gabaldon as he trailed one of the city’s recycling trucks in a pickup. We hopped out at a neighborhood near Payne’s Nursery, where Abe Sanchez and Lloyd Sandoval, operating a recycling truck, just finished dumping another load of cans, bottles and cardboard. We asked them about the upcoming changes.

“It’s going to be easier, labor-wise,” says Sandoval. “But I’m going to go miss the old system a little bit because I’ll be by myself rather than working with a partner.”

He adds, “We’re not going to get the exercise, so we’ll have to start going to the gym.”

For the city, it’s been a change long in the making. Our current recycling processor, the Albuquerque-based Friedman Recycling, doesn’t accept glass. We used to process all recycled materials here at BuRRT; however, since a joint city/county agency started contracting the task to Friedman in summer 2015, operators are leaving glass piled in Santa Fe and trucking other materials to Albuquerque.

The agency currently grinds up your Yuengling and Yoo-hoo bottles at BuRRT on the northeast end of town. Some of the end product is integrated into pavement. Much of it gets sold to Growstone, a hydroponic substrate manufacturer in Albuquerque, which is currently seeing a boom in sales thanks to the burgeoning marijuana industry. Santa Fe sold roughly 2,100 tons of glass to the company in 2016, according to Growstone CFO Tina Gibson.

City officials predict that recycling rates will stay flat in 2017, but eventually hope to see an 80 to 100-percent increase. We’ve already made great strides in recent years. Santa Fe County, including the city, raised its abysmal recycling rate from 8.4 percent in 2013 to 19 percent in 2015, according to the most recent available data.

Adam Schlachter, the city’s environmental services division outreach coordinator, says the recent improvement is partly due to Santa Fe’s switch to Friedman, which greatly expanded the array of recyclable materials available for curbside pickup. Suddenly, residents could toss milk cartons, phone books and yogurt tubs into their blue bins.

Switching to a single-stream recycling system, Schlachter believes, will help Santa Fe get closer to the national average of 34 percent. His theory isn’t rocket science.

“The 14-gallon container was the limiting factor for our program,” he says. “What we think happened—and it’s all anecdotal—is people filled up their 14-gallon container. What didn’t fit probably went into the trash can.”

Eldorado/285 Recycles, an advocacy organization, supports the change. “The city has had a very backwards system,” explains co-founder Joseph Eigner.

The new carts also include embedded chips that can track how often city residents recycle, but the officials aren’t planning on using that tool yet. Drivers will, however, use iPhones to record when residents don’t put their carts on the curb.

But some residents have called the city complaining about the switch from curbside glass pickup to drop-off locations. “People say they don’t want to drive,” says Eva Romero, a receptionist at the environmental services division. Others, she says, misconceive that city will stop recycling glass altogether.

When the new bins get distributed, Gabaldon estimates that it will take another couple weeks to fully implement the new system.

“The change, like anything, will take some time getting used to,” Gabaldon says. “But you’re gonna have to love it and like it because we’re not going with anything else.”

- See more at: http://www.sfreporter.com/santafe/article-13118-going-greener.html#sthash.flgHXyB8.dpuf

Recycle Your Damaged Clothes, Shoes, and Other Textiles at Goodwill Stores