The Franklin County Board of Commissioners say no matter what the cost, the quantity is too high. That’s why they are introducing a new resolution to eliminate the use of virgin paper products, encourage recycling, and discourage waste.

Besides making county offices more environmentally friendly, Board President Marilyn Brown says she hopes the new policy will help set an example for Franklin County residents.

“All over the county we’re enacting policies that are more environmentally friendly and trying to set an example for the way we do business as a way other can do business and how we need to run our lives in general,” Brown said.

The new policy will affect all county agencies under the Board’s control, and Brown says they hope to encourage other agencies to enact similar policies.

“The world has changed,” Brown said. “We need to do things in a more responsible manner to protect our communities.”

“The environmental impact really is that instead of the asphalt that was milled off winding up in a landfill or something it is being turned into a product that is being put back into the road,” Webster says.

Equipment operator Mike Brown describes the mixing process as simple. He says asphalt from construction sites is loaded into the recycler which then operates like a big clothes dryer. “You feed it through the machine. It goes through three stages of burners, you discharge it out the back and you got blacktop,” Brown says.

Brown says the asphalt recycler is still in the experimental stage. He adds it makes ten tons of ashpalt per hour and Brown says that sparked interest from other highway departments.

“We had a lot of people come look at it, ODOT, Franklin County, couple of townships. We might have started something here,” Brown says.

The Ohio Department of Transportation recently paid Columbus for use of the machine to repair potholes in the Polaris area.

Last year in the city of Columbus, residents threw out about 340-thousand tons of trash. They recycled a little more than 20-thousand tons. But Mayor Michael Coleman thinks he might have a solution.

Late last month, he introduced a pilot recycling program, called blue bag. Residents would put their paper, bottles and cans in a blue plastic bag, and then throw it in with the rest of their garbage. The blue bags would be pulled out for recycling at the transfer station.

The program will be rolled out to 10-thousand homes this spring. The city will concentrate on teaching those residents about recycling and how the program works. If it is a success, Mayor Coleman says he’d like to take it citywide by the end of 2006. But that would be a horrible mistake, says Betsey Vandercook, president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition. Chicago has had its own blue bag program for a decade.

In Chicago, the program has faced frequent criticism. A recently released study found just 13-percent of residents participate, despite millions of dollars in marketing. Vandercook says residents are dubious and for good reason.

Columbus officials admit the blue bag program isn’t the be all and end all but it’s a good option, they say, given the city’s budget limitations. Plus, Chicago’s 13% rate is still significantly better than what Columbus has right now.

For the past decade Columbus has contracted out its curbside recycling program to Cincinnati based Rumpke Incorporated. Residents pay 5-dollars a month to have their recycling picked up. But only about 10-thousand households participate out of more than 320-thousand in Columbus. Amanda Wilson of Rumpke says other cities have greater participation because they build recycling fees into city taxes and residents automatically get recycling bins. That’s not the case in Columbus.

Recycling experts say this system sets-up Columbus’s recycling program for failure. It’s simply not in residents’ economic interests to recycle. The Ohio department of Natural Resources recycling division advocates what’s known as a pay as you throw system,’ where trash disposal costs money based on quantity and all recycling is free.

That’s the system in Upper Arlington which has one of the best recycling rates in the state. Last year 46% of the city’s garbage was recycled. But Pay as you throw is politically unpopular and it simply wouldn’t be possible in Columbus, says Mary Carran Webster is assistant director of Public Service for Columbus.

The city spent more than 9-million dollars last year on tipping fees to dispose of the garbage at the Franklin County Landfill. Even if Columbus only increased its recycling rate to 20-percent, it could save up to 1-point-8 million dollars a year. The blue bag program is scheduled to start sometime in April in the southeast quadrant of the city.