Norwalk Rainbow

Today in Norwalk

Norwalk Wheeled Blue Bin Hell

The City of Norwalk has gone insane again... they are taking away all (stealing?) all the blue buckets and replacing them with giant bins on wheels. It's fine for a residential homeowner, problem is they've been doing this with all the business people as well, or apartment dwellers, where people live or work up a flight or more of stairs and have no place to store their new bin on wheels anywhere.

This wasn't thought out... it's a complete mess, creating new hardship for thousands of Norwalk residents. Result, now I guarantee you most of them will just stay on the side of the street, becoming a massive eye sore everywhere, because nobody will know where to put them or what to do with them. They will just take their recyclables to the bin and drop them in, it's already that way, you see them everywhere now, because nobody has anywhere to put them except leave them curbside!

Right now, at Fat Cat Pie, a very popular restaurant, the narrow street that leads down to the parking lot to the Yacht club, is lined with a dozen of these things, one for every tenant in the buildings. Not only is it ugly, it also makes it very difficult for delivery trucks to maneuver what was an already tight situation. I'm sure similar problems are arising everywhere.

There's a lot of other issues associated with single stream recycling, but this isn't what this is about. One size fits all bins are not adequate in an environment where most people don't need such large wheeled bins for the amount of recyclables they generate every week. It means tenants will have to learn how to consolidate their recyclables into fewer community bins rather than each tenant having their own, there just isn't enough room on the street for so many wheeled bins, most of them less than half empty anyway! It's overkill!

What the city did, is replace every blue bucket with a blue wheeled bin... People were in the habit of carrying their blue buckets down the stairs to the street, and brought them back into their kitchen, wherever they kept it inside their apartment or business. We cannot do that anymore! Now we have to find a place to keep this giant wheeled bin outside somewhere, while still keeping recyclables indoors until we take them out. These new bins with lids are great to keep things out of the rain, which has been a big problem for paper getting wet. But now businesses and apartment dwellers need to re-organize some form of community recycling for their buildings, so that we can reduce the number of wheeled bins which have been delivered, or rather dumped on everyone!

Another article... showing pictures of how the trucks lift and dump these wheeled bins: http://www.nancyonnorwalk.com/2013/07/city-carting-norwalk-need-time-to-work-it-out-director-says. Trust me it's going to get tedious for these guys who are quickly going to opt out of the automated lifting arm and go back to using their own muscle strength, especially with so many bins now at the curb.

Ah... "Alvord and Committee Chairman David McCarthy said smaller, 35-gallon carts are available, but they’re not handing them out yet."

Another good point being made by a comment, is that there are a lot of people collecting returnable bottles from blue bins, redeeming them for cash, who now will either stop doing this, because it will become too time consuming, or go through the large wheeled bins by dumping them out to sort through paper and everything else, leaving a mess.

- ugly overkill! -

Norwalk's Thinking Green Fri Feb 27 NCC

Think Green is coming to Norwalk, thanks to a program of the Greater Norwalk Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber's Leadership Institute held its graduation breakfast on Wednesday morning at the Dolce Norwalk Center, and it was announced that the 17 participants have put together Think Green, an event that will feature several exhibitors that will highlight conservation and environmental measures.

Think Green will take place from 3 to 7 p.m. on Friday Feb. 27 at Norwalk Community College.

The Leadership Institute, which began in 1981, is a Chamber program designed for Norwalk's new and up-and-coming business and community leaders. The nine-week program focuses on a variety of topics -- such as local government, economic development, media and education -- to help prepare the individuals for leaderships roles. Local prominent business people lead the weekly sessions.

The cornerstone of the institute is a project that the participants work on together. Historically, the end results of the projects have been reports given during the graduation event. Last year the Chamber changed the criteria of the projects to have tangible results at the end of the program.

This year all 17 participants worked on a single project, Think Green.

"We wanted them to focus on an activity that would be beneficial to businesses and the people of the city. We wanted an all-encompassing project," said Tony Izzo, site director at Northrop Grumman Norden Systems and chairman of the Leadership Institute. "All of the members played an active role and they did an outstanding job. It's a good project that will help everybody out. We gave them very little direction at the beginning."

Think Green will be free of charge and open to the public. The exhibitors, most of whom are already lined up, will be charged a small fee, which will be donated to a local school. The list of exhibitors include South Norwalk Electric and Water Co., Green Demolitions, Aitoro, iPark, and General Electric.

Brian Griffin, vice president of the Greater Norwalk Chamber of Commerce, was impressed with this year's Leadership Institute participants.

"We gave them a vague description of what we wanted and they took it upon themselves to develop it and put it together," he said. "Even though they've graduated, they'll stay in touch and keep working on it until the expo. This (Think Green) is something we hope to continue doing every year or every other year."

This story is from The Hour, a Norwalk, CT, newspaper... Click
http://www.thehour.com/story/461248 to read the complete article on their website.