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THE SUNCOAST NEWS

Published: August 2, 2008

RESORCE, the private group that is trying to get more Pasco County residents interested in recycling, held a telephone directory recycling effort that collected more than three times the tonnage its leaders were expecting. Now, county officials need to do more to encourage people to recycle, the RESORCE leaders say. "Why shouldn't Pasco County become a leader in recycling?" Lew Corvene, the club's president, told The Suncoast News this week.

The answer to Corvene's question, the truth be told, is Pasco officials have been conflicted from the start about recycling and remain so. The county rolled out the voluntary blue-bag program in response to the state's mandate that county's cut their solid waste streams 20 percent. Around the same time, it built a multimillion-dollar resource recovery plant that burns that waste and produces electricity because a lot of people didn't want the county to create a massive new landfill. At the time, county officials said the voluntary recycling program was the most cost effective - i.e. least financially burdensome - way to meet the state mandate.

Now, however, that plant often receives more garbage than it can handle and Pasco has to ship the excess to another county for disposal. It could handle the overflow by adding another boiler unit to the resource recovery plant. That would, however, cost upward of $150 million, according to one, rapidly aging, estimate. Some people in and out of county government have suggested switching to some form of mandatory recycling would allow the county to delay expanding the plant, although no one seems sure for how long.

Unless this turns out to be a long time, we doubt a mandatory recycling regime would be worth the effort and expense. So let's get an answer to that question first.

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