Composting and Green Tree Waste Reduction Program
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REFUSE DISTRICT EMBRACES GREEN TECHNOLOGY: $115K GRANT TO BENEFIT ALL NIAGARA COMMUNITIES
LOCKPORT—Niagara County Refuse District Director Rick Pope showed off a massive machine that turns green waste into compost to the chairman of the Legislature committee that oversees county waste disposal services today, having just received a grant from the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation to help pay for the tool.
The grant, which was recently expedited through the efforts of Sen. George D. Maziarz, R-Newfane, after long delays in releasing the funds by the DEC, pays for a Gruendler-brand hammer-mill, a huge machine that turns green waste into compost.
“Instead of using the earth’s valuable resources, and continuing to abuse our natural resources, what we need to do is think smarter,” said Legislator John D. Ceretto, R-Lewiston, who chairs the Legislature’s Refuse Disposal District Committee. “And in this process—and it’s a hot topic in the world—we have to reuse the material instead of destroying our natural environment. It’s better for us to reuse that material so that our children, and future generations, will live in a world that the past generations were good stewards of.”
Ceretto and Pope celebrated receipt of a $114,800 check from the DEC by
jointly touring the Niagara County Landfill here, watching the Gruendler
hammer-mill hard at work turning debris from a recent storm into compost. The
DEC payment offset the costs of the county’s 2002 purchase of the Gruendler.
Ceretto called Niagara County’s decision to purchase the massive grinder “innovative,” noting it had helped municipalities throughout the county eliminate downed trees and limbs following a massive lake effect storm in 2006 as part of its mandate to be used as a “shared service.”
“It benefits not only Niagara County government, but all the residents throughout the county because all the towns and cities will be able to use this vehicle to grind up material for their own landscaping, instead of landfilling,” he noted.
“It matters to taxpayers because instead of the towns or the cities having the machinery to do this work that has to be done—instead of them paying for it—Niagara County government is buying the equipment, and it is expensive equipment, and we are sharing it with the local municipalities,” Ceretto said. “So, it’s less expensive for them to do this. It makes it available to them not only to cut costs, but to act as an incentive to recycle rather than landfill.”
Ceretto noted that, in addition to offsetting costs to residents, the Gruendler
signaled that “Niagara County is going green.” Ceretto
also noted that the compost created by the Gruendler could be resold by the
county to offset the costs of operating its refuse disposal operations.
Pope, who also highlighted several other efforts to cut costs at the county landfill during Ceretto’s tour, termed the Gruendler a “win-win situation for all the communities in Niagara County.”
“Legislator Ceretto and Sen. Maziarz saw the need for us to put together a shared-services program to limit the amount of green waste going into our landfills in the county,” Pope said. “This gets material right from the doorsteps and right into a process where we can recycle it and return it back to the public in a useable form.”
