The municipal recycling at the Washington Township is in for a boost with over $200,000 in grant coming to them from the Environmental Protect program in Pennsylvania. The fund will be used to purchase a baling machine. Last year, they incurred losses because of repairs needed on their existing machine.
A grant for the new baling machine
The Washington Township will use the new baler to compress and bale recyclable items. The existing baler was proving costly to them. Last year, it cost them $27,000 on repairs alone to continue using the old baler, so the recycling rate was low. The new machine is likely to be set up in early summer.
Despite the losses and low rate of recycling, the revenue obtained from the transfer station off Pa.16 helped offset the losses to an extent. They could generate revenue of over $59,000, according to sources. Yet, in ordinary course, a higher amount could be generated compared to the revenue they earned.
With the announcement of the fresh grant award, the supervisors at the Washington Township congratulated each other at their meeting. They hope that the new baler machine would help them generate more revenue. The recycling center will probably do more work this year with aluminum cans so as to generate larger quantum of revenue according to sources. Since the machine doesn’t do single-stream recycling, Washington Township will not take materials from commercial haulers, but instead, they will focus on the needs of residents and municipalities. In 2012, the Township recycled over 3000 tons of materials.
The need to encourage eco friendly promotional items
Recycling prevents the wastage of useful materials. Additionally, it reduces air and water pollution and thereby decreases greenhouse gas emissions. A fully functional recycling center, especially the one in a single stream recycling format, makes the task of recycling easier. The recycling centers encourage and promote the generation of eco friendly promotional items. A single-stream recycling offers several advantages with the latest technology to sort recyclable materials that need not be separated. It encourages mass participation as it uses automated collection.
While the Washington Township is a fully functional recycling center, they can further improve their efforts with single-stream recycling which they currently lack. So, different waste materials cannot be mixed together for the purpose of recycling. In other words, glass, paper, and cans have to be deposited separately for recycling. If they adopt the single-stream recycling system with state-of-the-art machine, they may possibly enhance their recycling effort several times compared to what it is now.
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