The city of Cordova, in conjunction with the Copper River Watershed Project and responsible residents, is trying hard to reduce, re-use and recycle as much as possible, to extend the life of our landfill.
These efforts also help eliminate ‘one-time’ use materials and packaging; and just plain make us feel good about our efforts!
In 2016, the city began collecting glass containers, not to recycle, but to re-purpose the glass as an inert covering over the landfill cell. This glass program has been working well since it started up one year ago February.
Here’s a brief update:
The City has collected 17 full dumpsters (equivalent to 68 cubic yards ‘before crushing’)
The City has two dumpsters to collect glass.
The contents of the dumpsters, once crushed, cover an equivalent of about 10 cubic yards of landfill.
How can the City improve the glass re-use program?
Educating our community on how to participate.
Dedicate more dumpsters so that the effort is more worthwhile, resulting in a larger, more efficient outcome.
Aluminum beverage cans were the first material that the community began to recycle. There are two dumpsters available for the public to recycle personal use aluminum beverage cans. These two dumpsters are located at the front of the Cordova Post Office and on the backside of Harbor Loop Road.
Again, the city is limited on the quantity of containers dedicated to this project to two dumpsters. These two dumpsters fill up very fast because of this limitation. One solution is for folks to crush their cans before they place them in the dumpsters. This makes room for more cans.
We do need some uncrushed cans to make the bale stick together when crushed and intermingled in the baler box. Crushing every other can saves lots of dumpster space. One uncrushed can takes up the space of about three crushed cans. We can really use the space to keep our dumpsters from overflowing causing uncrushed cans to spill out and blow away which is ugly and defeats our whole purpose!
Currently, the Refuse Division Crew is emptying the dumpsters about once a month. Crushed cans help us save fuel, save dumpster volume space and crushed cans leave more room for more folks to dump their aluminum beverage cans.
Do you have any suggestions on how to improve our efforts? Send your comments to: pio@cityofcordova.net or mail to PO Box 1210. ATTN: Cordova Recycles.
