Bella Vista recycling a great model
Thank you very, very much for supporting the Bella Vista Recycling Center. It is so needed as a national role model for clean, honest recycling. The recycling center provides remanufacturers, also called end-users, with material they can actually make into new product. An aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery store shelf in less than 60 days. That means back in the economic loop.
American curbside recycling is in a crisis, and it could have been prevented. Putting all recyclables -- paper, plastic, metals and glass -- into a single compartment truck (known as single-stream recycling) significantly increases the level of contamination. Little Rock admits around 40 percent contamination with their single-stream program. I wonder how much higher that number would be if we could look inside the bales being shipped.
Fayetteville's curb-sort program, in which recyclables are sorted at the curb into segregated compartments on the truck, results in less than 5 percent contamination. Fayetteville's system is very good, it just needs to be tweaked. Wake up entrepreneurs, opportunity awaits.
This mess with China would not have happened had American citizens stayed engaged with their local Three R programs, thus resulting in transparency, and had not the garbage industry been given total control of municipal recycling. They should only have contractual instruction.
Folks, we are talking about five billion dollars in annual business. see http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/11/news/china-scrap-ban-us-recycling/index.html.
Louise Mall
Fayetteville
Work to expand national cemetery continues
"RNCIC saves our national cemetery" was the heading of an editorial in the Northwest Arkansas Times on Aug. 8, 1991. That heading is still an accurate statement today.
Many may ask, "What is the RNCIC and where is the National Cemetery?"
The Regional National Cemetery Improvement Corp. formed as a non-profit by several veterans in 1984 when the Fayetteville National Cemetery was running out of burial space for veterans and facing closure. The Fayetteville National Cemetery is at 700 S. Government Ave. off Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Fayetteville.
For more than 33 years, this group has purchased land adjacent to the Fayetteville National Cemetery and increased its size by over 200 percent since the cemetery's founding in 1867. This has been accomplished through numerous donations and fund-raising activities.
The Department of Veterans Affairs will not purchase additional land for an existing national cemetery. Other national cemeteries across America have been permanently closed when interment space is fully utilized. To the best of our knowledge, the RNCIC is the only non-profit corporation of its kind working to purchase adjacent land and donate that land to the Veterans Administration to keep a national cemetery open for veteran burials. That is the mission of the RNCIC, to save our national cemetery in Fayetteville.
The group meets at 10 a.m. on the second Saturday of each month at American Legion Post 27, 1195 S. Curtis Ave. in Fayetteville. New members are needed, as well as your donations.
Go to the website RNCIC.com to read the editorial article from Aug. 8, 1991, in its entirety and for more information about the RNCIC. I am so proud to offer my volunteer services to such a worthy cause. It is a small repayment for the service and the lives given by those interred at the Fayetteville National Cemetery.
Lorna Sterrett
Bella Vista
Editorial on 09/20/2017