Sustainability Advisory Board Agenda and Packet 2011 09 21

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Sustainability AdvisoryBoard August 2011 Meeting Minutes Page 4of 4 To: Louisville City Council From: Louisville Sustainability Advisory Board Subject: LSAB Endorsement of Boulder County’s Zero-Waste Plan Date: 21 July2011 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 onsite collection of recyclables at multi-family residential units. (p 26) Our city staff have established their own internal Sustainability Committee, which dealswith waste- reduction practices for staff and city-owned facilities. Recent visible results of their work are the 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’s development has taken quite some time. It started with detailed analysis of options initially provided by Ms Lisa Skumatz (SERA, Superior), and continued with detailed discussions about the many options at 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 a later 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 its recommendations 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 within our city-government departments. We believe the Planis a well-considered document that can help guide our city’s efforts to achieve more effective and measurable results in reducing the amounts of our community’s waste that currently just goes to landfills. th , when you are scheduled to hear We look forward to attending your study-session meeting on August 9 a presentation of the Plan from Ms Lisa Friend. We look forward to hearing your comments about it, and we will be available to answer any questions you may have for us about it.