EcoEKY: Green News from Eastern Kentucky

From the Ashland Daily-Independent Online:

Put trash here

Published: March 31, 2008 04:03 pm

Lawrence County plans to use an $8,400 award from East Kentucky PRIDE to place 14 large roll-off trash bins at 12 locations throughout the county. Here’s hoping they prove more effective than the first “green boxes” placed throughout the county more than 25 years ago.

There are at least two reasons to hope that this effort will be more successful. One is that attitudes about illegal dumps and litter have changed in the last quarter of a century. The other is that the Lawrence County Fiscal Court recently enacted a mandatory trash collection ordinance.

Instead of ordinary household waste, Eddie Michael — the former Lawrence County school superintendent who now serves as the county’s deputy judge-executive — said the new dumpsters will be for old appliances, cabinets and other items too large to be picked up by regular trash collectors. In fact, about the only items that the bins will not collect are old tires and glass and items primarily made out of glass.

Back in the early 1980s, Lawrence County became one of the first area counties to place green boxes throughout the county where residents could deposit their household waste. It was hoped the dumpsters would eliminate — or at least reduce — illegal dumping in the county.

But it didn’t quite work that way. Instead of becoming a way to eliminate eyesores in the county, the green boxes became eyesores. So many people deposited trash in them, that the county could not empty them quickly enough. Thus, each of the dump sites soon became littered with trash. Finding the trash containers full, residents wanting to use them for their trash simply dumped the trash on the ground near them.

County officials soon concluded that the green baxes were causing more problems than they solved, and they were removed. What had seemed like a good idea for eliminating illegal dumping did not work that way in practice.

But in the ensuing years, attitudes about trash have changed. For that, PRIDE — Personal Responsibility for a Desirable Environment — deserves much of the credit. Since being founded in 1997 by U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers and the late James Bickford, secretary of the state environmental protection cabinet under former Gov. Paul Patton, PRIDE has emphasized the need to end the trashing of eastern Kentucky. The efforts of Rogers and many others have been effective. While illegal dumping continues to be a problem in the region, it is not nearly as bad as it was a decade ago.

Michael said no Lawrence County resident will be more than three miles from a collection bin. And if the elderly or disabled cannot get the items to the dumpsters, the county will pick them up. That should eliminate any excuses for throwing the old washing machine over a hillside instead of placing it in one of the dumpsters.