The city's Solid Waste Services department hopes to improve recycling in the entertainment district after finding several glitches in a six-month recycling pilot program conducted on Sixth Street last year.
The concept of the Sixth Street Recycling Task Force began two years ago when environmental groups Clean Water Action and Ecology Action, and several activists and musicians wrote thousands of letters to the City Council in support of implementing recycling on Sixth Street.
"Environmental protection is a way of life in Austin. Sixth Street is our ambassador, and when tens of thousands of people visit our city every year, they're going to end up on Sixth Street," said Sparky Anderson, Texas program director of Clean Water Action. "We want people to take home the idea of recycling to their home towns."
The pilot program focused on the 300 block of Sixth Street, including nine restaurants and bars. The program ended in August 2001, and officials have since been evaluating its effectiveness. Officials found that the program faced a number of challenges: Choosing convenient dumpster locations, finding recycling trucks that could fit through narrow alleys, training restaurant and bar employees about recycling procedures and controlling contamination in glass dumpsters.
"City Council actually formed this commission to look at the glass challenge on Sixth Street," said Mike Risden, chairman of the Sixth Street Task Force. "One of the challenges was contamination in recycling dumpsters like food waste, plastic bags. It made it more difficult for the processor to process the material."
Jerry Hendrix, spokesman for the Solid Waste Services Department, said the costs of glass recycling also posed a challenge. By the time the garbage was sorted, the economic benefits of recycling was lost, he said.
"Glass has to be cleaned and broken down to sand. There isn't a lot of environmental savings in association with recycling glass," Hendrix said. "There isn't a big demand from recycled glass so you don't get a huge revenue."
The task force will present the council with possible revisions May 15.
"I'm confident that a workable program will not raise costs in any substantial way and that recycling will make Austin the type of sustainable community we want to live in," Anderson said.
Kenny Luna, Ivory Cat Tavern owner and participant in the pilot program, said recycling is important to the city and thinks the program is a positive idea.
"The effort is necessary. We need something down here, and I'm not saying this is the best way that this could've been done," Luna said. "If someone else was trying to get it going again, we'd certainly be interested in participating."
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