Sustainability Advisory Board Agenda and Packet 2011 07 20

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To: Louisville City Council From: Louisville Sustainability Advisory Board Subject: LSAB Endorsement of Boulder County’s Zero-Waste Plan Date: August 2011 Page 2 of 2 Our community-wide compost-recyclables-trash collection program includes a Pay-As-You-Throw their volume of pricing structure, which provides residents with an economic incentive to reduce collected trash, and it provides free (embedded) recycling. (p 20) Louisville once again offers residents an option for local tree-limb drop-off. (p 19) Louisville has recently provided a drop-off site for local collection of scrap metals. (p 22) A few years ago, following a recommendation from LRCAB, our city adopted an ordinance to improve the onsitecollection of recyclables at multi-family residential units. (p 26) Our city staff haveestablished theirown internal Sustainability Committee, which deals with waste- reduction practices for staff and city-owned facilities. Recentvisible results of their work arethe waste-collection bins now in place in city buildings, for collection of compostables-recyclables-trash. (p 27) th and Our city has implemented zero-waste practicesat community-wide events, such as the July 4 Labor-Day Fall Festival events at Community Park.Events coordinator Kay Gazaway has reported to us they’ve had an 85%-plus diversion-from-landfill rate at those events! (p 38) The Plan’sdevelopment has taken quite some time. It startedwith detailed analysis of optionsinitially provided by Ms Lisa Skumatz (SERA, Superior), and continued withdetailed discussions aboutthe many optionsat various public meetings and the monthly meetings of Boulder County’s Resource Conservation Advisory Board over the past several months. The Plan has been refined over that time, with input from dozens of county residents, business owners, and local-government representatives. All its recommend- ations have had detailed reviews and consideration of their likely effectiveness for short-(1-2 years) or mid-term (3-5 years)success. Some initially recommended items have been deferred for reconsideration at alater time, or have fallen by the wayside due to a likely lack of success or effectiveness. To more effectively expand our city’s waste-diversion efforts, we encourage you to adopt the county’s Zero-Waste Plan as a guiding document for our city. You have two groups within our local-government structure who can review itsrecommendations in detail, asses their applicability for our city and their likelihood of success, and pass along their recommendations to you and our city staff. Our own Sustainability Advisory Board can review the plan’s recommendations for community-wide applications, and the city staff’s Sustainability Committee can reviewthe plan’s recommendations for applications withinour city-government departments.We believe the Planis a well-considered document that can help guide our city’s effortsto achieve more effective and measurable results in reducing the amounts of our community’s waste that currently just goes to landfills.