Is Fort Collins as sustainable as we claim?
For being hailed as a national sustainability hub, Fort Collins is slightly behind in both recycling and composting initiatives. Seattle has it in their municipal code that they must compost and recycle within the city limits, but Fort Collins has only made proposals on composting, and the recycling expansion has been delayed while the many business owners have been cut off from recycling services.
While many cities are aggressively moving towards making composting a reality, Fort Collins is still stalling on their plans to move forward. Fort Collins has a great plan for composting, but there are very few places to currently compost within the city and the implementation keeps being pushed back more and more. In the meantime, the landfill is filling up and will soon be full. Once the landfill closes, we as a community will be forced to decide whether to tear apart more land to bury our trash or to invest in composting. However, composting initiatives take time and expensive facilities, making the switch much less plausible the longer we wait. Although they officially encourage residents to compost on their own in their backyards, there is little information that is easily accessible about the progress of their proposed program, hoping to have 90% diversion of waste by 2025.
There have also been implementation of new restrictions on recycling, allowing trash companies to apply surcharges for the pick up of trash and recycling, which could potentially drive away both people who cannot afford the surcharge or people that are not keen on recycling in the first place. There have also been many businesses that have spoken out about their recycling bins being removed from around Old Town. After the renovation of Old Town Square, many of the recycling bins behind bars and restaurants were removed or relocated, leaving only one cardboard collection bin for several blocks and forcing owners to bring their recycling to one of the new collection centers. However, many reports say that there will be an implementation of more locations of bins for businesses and multi-family complexes coming soon.
The inconsistencies are becoming common enough that many residents are noticing and speaking out. However, there is still hope for the situation. There have been new changes to the recycling center, which should help expand the program to more residents and more businesses soon.
Fort Collins, to keep up with the national trends of sustainability, needs to speed up their approach to sustainable waste management if they want to continue to be viewed as a sustainability powerhouse. The fact that they have not made moves towards composting facilities, a sustainable option for when the landfill closes, and a more incentive-driven recycling program shows that there is much improvement still to come in the Fort Collins sustainability community.
Sarah Ross is a freelance writer for Beyond the Oval and can be reached on Twitter at @HowSarahTweets.
