A study is underway in the upper valley (Aspen/Pitkin County) to see what people are tossing in the trash. It’s a dirty job, but the goal is to find ways to get more people to recycle and extend the life of the Pitkin County landfill. Aspen Public Radio’s Marci Krivonen reports.
A front loader dumps bags of trash onto a tarp at the Pitkin County landfill. It’s garbage from households and businesses from Carbondale to Aspen.
Nearby a group of ten workers in white safety suits is picking through the trash.
"I’m an environmental health geek, so this is a great job. I wouldn’t want to do it everyday. (laughs)."
Jannette Whitcomb is with the City of Aspen’s environmental health department. Today, instead of sitting at her desk, she’s…
"Sorting. We have all these different bins, so I'm really getting into it!"
The sorters are tossing trash into containers for aluminum, glass, wood waste, and so on. The idea is to see what people aren’t doing. So far, it appears people are slacking on composting. Cathy Hall is Solid Waste Manager for the landfill.
"Right now it’s looking like food waste is the biggest chunk by weight," she says.
Already, it’s free to drop off composting here and the city and county have distributed composting bins. But, those incentives may not be enough.
The goal of today’s trash sort is to reduce the number of items buried at the landfill. Hall says, the effort could lengthen the life of the landfill.
"As much as we can divert, the better," she says. "Because as we stand today, we have about 18 years of life left. We’re working on a ten year expansion, but that’s not a lot of time. It’ll be here before we know it."
A secondary goal of today’s sort is to get more Aspen residents to divert trash. Liz O’Connell with the City says, right now, 21 percent is being diverted.
"It's double what the Colorado rate is, but it’s far below the national average, which is 35 percent. It’s far, far less than the outstanding cities like Seattle and San Francisco that divert 80 percent. So, we could do a lot better."
The trash sort is part of a longer-term effort. Eventually the city and county will set diversion goals that may lead to new rules and incentives around diverting trash. Two commissioners and one city councilman toured the trash sort Thursday well ahead of any decision-making.