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Signing off on sustainability: City offers candidates opportunity to recycle signs
Photos courtesy of the city of Allen -- The city of Allen invited candidates to dispose of unwanted campaign signs in the city hall parking lot from June 1 to June 7. An entire six-yard Community Waste Disposal container was filled with the signs by the third day of the project. Officials from the city of Allen say it is the first program of its kind in Collin County.
By Conner Hammett, chammett@starlocalnews.com
Campaigns for public office can take a toll on the pocketbook of a candidate. But a lesser-known price of democracy is the influx of thousands of non-biodegradable plastic corrugated campaign signs to area landfills.
This election season, however, the city of Allen had candidates covered. For the first week of June, the city offered May primary and general election candidates with an opportunity to divert their campaign signs from landfills to a specialized recycling facility.
Starting June 1, a six-yard front-load container, provided at no cost by Community Waste Disposal, was parked at city hall so candidates could dump their unwanted campaign signs and wire stands. By Sunday, the container was full, and signs continued to flow in, piling up on the ground next to the container.
"We keep growing and growing and growing, and what [most people] don't think about is the trash that comes with people," she said. "We create about seven pounds of trash per person per day, and that's a lot of trash, so if it all goes to a landfill, you're going to be building a landfill every 20 years or less, whenever you get as many people as they say are coming to Texas."
The idea started at the office of Chuck Presley, the Pct. 3 constable who made an unsuccessful bid for sheriff during this year's election. Faced with stacks of unwanted signs, Presley asked Chief Deputy Lonnie Simmons to look into the possibilities of recycling the signs. Simmons, a former chair of the Keep Allen Beautiful board and current Allen CDC member, called Kliewer, who within 30 minutes was able to speak to a contact with Kaufman County's Environmental Co-op, who knew of a plant that could process the signs and offered to arrange for the signs to be picked up from the city at no cost.
"If you took one group of campaign signs from one person, we would not have enough to recycle them, because it costs money to have a guy come out in a truck, pick them up and rent the container to put them in," Kliewer said. "Whenever you've got the entire bunch ... that will put their signs out there, then you've got enough to recycle and it's worth their time to come get them. Recycling is not free. It's just what we ought to be doing."
Simmons said he has worked on many campaigns in his 28 years with the constable's office, and up until now, campaign signs have ended up in the trash. He said he intends to spread word of the initiative not just throughout the county but statewide through his professional contacts.
"If you're going to send them back for re-use, you can keep them out of the landfill,” Simmons said. “I don't know the stats on how long it would take one of these corrugated plastic signs to deteriorate ... but I know it would be years and years. Why fill up the landfill when there are groups that will recycle them?"
Kliewer said she is looking into the feasibility of offering the program every year and would like to add it to Allen's growing list of innovative waste disposal initiatives, including its first-of-its-kind-in-the-state hazardous household waste program.
"The one thing that comes out of this for me is, there's an opportunity to do the right thing with almost everything you have," she said. "There's very little that is actually trash, and I think we need to be more aware about what is trash and what isn't trash to where we don't wind up with more trash than we have room for."
The following are comments from the readers.
In no way do they represent the view of Starlocalnews.com
In no way do they represent the view of Starlocalnews.com
RAW2012 wrote on Jun 14, 2012 2:51 PM:
" This is an awesome idea! All of our cities in the area should replicate the same program. Forward thinking at its best and a great public service for Allen residents. "
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