The
City’s environmental services department has decided to discontinue
the commercial recycling and the commercial solid waste market, which
will include EPCC’s recycling program.
Environmental Services will now focus exclusively on residential services.
The city plans to launch the new Residential Curbside Recycling program
in early 2007.
A letter sent to all the campuses at EPCC notified the college of
service cuts.
“It’s bad news for the college,” said Juan Lopez,
district manager of distribution services. “The city doesn’t
charge, so now we have to work on a proposal to send a bid to see
who wants to support us.
EPCC’s
Manager of Distributional Services, Juan Lopez, inspects recycling
bins to be removed
by the City Nov. 30.
Photo by Jamie Jimenez
The
purchasing department has to find a company to pick up the recycled
materials.
“The problem is we have to purchase the bins,” said Lopez.
The city will continue to provide EPCC with services until Nov. 30.
After that, the city will start collecting all the city property including
cans, bins, baskets, dumpsters and other items related to this program.
“We have a $22- million deficit and in order to save money,
we need to stop the free services we offer,” said Ellen Smyth,
the director of the environmental services for El Paso.
“We lose $2 million a year to commercial services and most districts
don’t want to pay, especially EPCC,” said Smyth.
“Being on a tight budget, they can’t afford it. The bottom
line is that it’s hard to make money when we provide all these
services for free.”
Smyth doesn’t want to stop the entire recycling program, however.
“There is going to be a time when we run out of natural resources,”
replied Lopez.
Natural resources are being depleted rapidly, particularly with the
increasing use of disposable products and packaging he said.
Environmental problems such as global warming, hazardous waste, loss
of rain forests, endangered species, acid rain, and the ozone layer
have become so complex that many individuals feel that they can have
no effect on them.
At the very least, these problems require group action. The college’s
recycling activities can make a difference. Lopez said that the bins
that the college has marked for recycled materials are not for trash.
“Students need to respect the services we provide for them,”
said Lopez. “The more we keep up with recycling, the less garbage
winds up in our landfills and incinerations plants. We can still reduce
the negative impacts that the extraction and processing of un-recycled
materials has on the environment.”
