Though unsightly in both function and appearance, the recycling center is making significant improvements in the way Burbank handles its waste disposal, Hampel told the City Council in his "State of Recycling" report on Tuesday.
The city's curbside pickup of recyclable waste and its community outreach efforts to promote recycling are among measures contributing to more environment-conscious waste-disposal, he said.
The waste business is a "necessary evil," said Hampel, who began his career in urban forestry, which included a garden program for the Burbank Unified School District.
In recent years, recycling programs have enabled the city to better manage waste disposal, pushing toward a long-term goal of a sustainable community, curbing the "über consumption" that wreaks havoc on the environment, he said.
But the talk of a sustainable community is still in its infancy, he said. "We really don't have a handle on differentiating between our needs and our wants," he said. In his report, Hampel laid out several recommendations, including carrying out continued community outreach, implementing recycling incentives for private waste companies and adopting a "zero waste" resolution by the beginning of 2007, which reflects the council's aim for a community generating the least amount of waste possible.
Councilman Jef Vander Borght applauded the successes of the recycling center while emphasizing that work still needed to be done.
"Nobody wants to talk about trash, nobody wants to deal with trash, but it's such an incredible amount of waste that comes out of our daily lives and we all generate it, so we have to deal with it," he said. "And we're in such a tremendous position as a city because A, we have a landfill and B, we have an active and incredibly robust recycling process that is reducing our use of the landfill dramatically … But more needs to be done."
The changing composition of refuse poses new obstacles for recycling as enormous electronic devices such as stereos, televisions, microwaves and computers crowd the center, Hampel said. The center took in about five tons of electronic waste per year when it first started collecting electronic items. These days the center takes in that much in a week, he said.
