West Virginia environmental officials say they awarded $1.8 million to 28 municipal agencies, nonprofits and private industries to boost recycling.
The 2017 grants are funded through the $1 assessment per ton of solid waste disposed at landfills in the state.
The Department of Environmental Protection says $148,000 for the Cabell County Solid Waste Authority will help pay for wages, fuel, maintenance, recycling trailers, balers, other equipment and public outreach.
Other grants include $98,000 to the Mercer County Commission for personnel, conferences, a recycling truck and other equipment and supplies.
Another $125,000 has been awarded to the Mercer County Solid Waste Authority to help buy a baler and conveyor system and pay wages.
The Raleigh County Solid Waste Authority was awarded $150,000 toward a truck, a hoist and fuel.
Charleston is considering ending a rule that allows residents to use recycling bins instead of clear plastic bags the city provides.
The Charleston Gazette reports bins were allowed last year. Residents have not had to separate their recyclable items since June 2014.
But the city says it will have to stop using the bins if it wants to keep taking its recyclables to the Raleigh County Solid Waste Authority. City officials say the bins create more opportunities for recyclables such as paper and cardboard to get wet and become unusable.
Raleigh County has been removing about 40 percent of what Charleston hauls there and putting it in the landfill.
The city has been hauling its recyclable to Raleigh County since West Virginia Recycling Services shut down last fall.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Division of Natural Resources are gearing up for their 10th annual Christmas tree recycling event.
The event is set for Jan. 3 at the Capitol Market in downtown Charleston. Officials will again recycle the Christmas trees and use them to improve fish habitats across the state.
Over the years, thousands of live trees have been collected and placed in lakes across the state to improve fish habitat. This year, trees will be placed in Beech Fork, East Lynn, Stonewall Jackson, Sutton and Tygart lakes.
The recycling event brought close to 500 trees last year.
To be accepted, all decorations must be removed from the trees, including ornaments, tinsel and stands.
That Christmas tree adding holiday flair to your living room could become a condo for fish in a West Virginia lake.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Division of Natural Resources will host their 10th annual Christmas tree recycling event Jan. 3 at the Capitol Market in downtown Charleston.
Over the years, thousands of live trees have been collected and placed in lakes across the state to improve fish habitat. This year, trees will be placed in Beech Fork, East Lynn, Stonewall Jackson, Sutton and Tygart lakes.
To be accepted, all decorations must be removed from the trees, including ornaments, tinsel and stands.
Janice Summers-Young is one of two West Virginian artists who were selected for a new exhibit at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia. The exhibit, called Second Time Around: The Hubcap as Art, features 287 artists from 36 different countries and opened yesterday.
Young lives in the community of Queen Shoals, about a mile from the Elk River, right on the line between Kanawha and Clay Counties. By day, she and her husband Terry work for their construction business. Most weekends they spend hiking, camping, and collecting materials that Young uses in collages that are on display throughout their home.
“I’ve always loved art, and I’ve always done some form of art, and tried to make my whole life a kind of art,” said Young.
When Young and her husband began to build their home, they discovered fossils in the rocks that they dug out of the dirt. So they decided to use the fossilized stones to build the exterior of their home.
“The area had been coal mined quite a bit, some years back. We started building our house here, we started hand-picking our stones from where we had dug here, the excavation, the stones we turned up, and also stones along the creek bank, because they’re rich in fossils. And I also wanted it to look like this house fit here,” said Young.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Young with one of her collage pieces
Young’s art, like her home, also includes objects from nature, from wasp nests that are preserved with porcelain, to pieces of driftwood that are constructed into circular collages, inspired by whirlpools she finds in rivers.
She also finds imaginative ways to incorporate pieces of trash that other people dump in the woods, like using scrap wire to shape into trees.
Her work drew the attention of Pennsylvania artist Ken Marquis, founder of the Landfill Arts Project. He invited Young to submit a piece of art for a new exhibit, which opened on September 7th. Over 1,000 artists from around the world were given a hubcap. Each of them repurposed their hubcap in their own way. Young was one of a few hundred artists whose piece was selected for the exhibit.
“When I got the hubcap, the first thing that entered my mind was the driftwood piece, inside the hubcap. I’ve seen so many hubcaps in the river. And I’ve watched them pop off the hill and roll down into the river.
And there’s swirlholes where the whirlpools land, and they’re circular. And they’ll have little bits of wood or stones collect inside of them, said Young.”
The Landfill Arts Project organized the exhibit to help encourage the public to think creatively about re-purposing old materials. What one person might consider trash, artists like Janice Young see as materials that can be used to create.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Painting of an owl, by Janice Summers-Young
“I thought it was a really really neat project that’s gonna have that many people from all around participating in something that I’m passionate about. You know, just not wasting so much and trying to reuse as much as possible. No, we can’t all be environmental saints, but any little thing that we can do all adds up eventually,” said Young.
Young says she doesn’t consider herself an environmentalist. But as a West Virginian artist, she does feels inspired by the delicate beauty of the mountains and the rivers. Often, it’s a beauty that she thinks is abused.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Part of one of Young’s paintings
When she sees trash in the river, she picks it up, and tries to turn it into art. Now, that art will be on display in a museum, surrounded by the works of artists from across the world. All 287 of them are tied together by the willingness to create– out of the waste that most people call trash.
Young and another West Virginian artist, Romney Shelton Collins, will both have their hubcap art on display at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia through next March. The museum is open Tuesday-Sunday, 10-4.
Zero-waste events–that’s the goal of one start-up organization in Morgantown. Green Earth Event Services was founded by Morgantown resident Garth Lindley…
Zero-waste events–that’s the goal of one start-up organization in Morgantown. Green Earth Event Services was founded by Morgantown resident Garth Lindley in 2011. The organization provides recycling and composting services and Lindley says that while there’s a learning curve among public they interact with, he’s surprised by the overall enthusiasm he receives wherever the organization sets up.
Fonder Garth Lindley says he grew increasingly frustrated at 5k and 10k race events with the amount of waste he say being carted off to landfills and it inspired him to take action.
“I thought, ‘Somebody ought to be doing something about that.’ And it turns out I was the person that needed to be doing something about that, ” Lindley says.
So he went to work. And he found great need. He says, overwhelmingly, wherever he goes, people are almost relieved to see the service.
“I kind of naively thought I was going to just help a few friends do four or five races and I’ve been really surprised by—especially this past year,” he says. “People are coming out of the wood work asking me for advice or to come to their event.”
So it began as a sort of hobby and has grown into a nonprofit waste-diversion service that recycles and composts to keep waste from events out of landfills.
Lindley at the composting station he set up at the recent Empty Bowls event in Morgantown. He says he hopes arranging for organizations like his becomes a regular part of event planning in the near future.
Lindley points to the recent 2,000-person event in Morgantown called Empty Bowls, a fundraiser for Mon County soup kitchens, as an example of successful waste intervention.
Green Earth Event Services was able to prevent more than 900 pounds of waste from being sent to a landfill. Specifically, the event generated 160 pounds of recycling, about 300 pounds of compost, and 440 pounds of pig slop that went to WVU Farms.
Lindley says he’s evolved the mission of the organization to now include how-to education component. “I’d really like to teach a man to fish,” he says, “so next year with Empty Bowls, I’m going to work with somebody on the committee for Empty Bowls, teaching them how to do it, what the connection are, that kind of thing, and the third year, they do it.”
Lindley has high hopes for the future. Not only is he hoping that organizations like his will become a normal part of event planning, he’s hoping waste accountability in general will become less of an afterthought:
“Ultimately, ultimately I would like to see companies thinking about what they’re putting into the environment. We’re kind of dealing with it on the back end—if we could deal with it on the front end of what we’re putting into the environment we wouldn’t have to deal with it on the back end quite as much.”
Lindley is hosting his own race this year in Morgantown on Earth Day. He says it will be a 0-waste event.
“Everything can be either reused or recycled,” he says. From race numbers to banners and signage, Lindley says the Earth Day celebration will be designed to leave no trace.
