Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Regional Landfill Is Awarded Grant

A grant for $126,924 has been awarded to the Upper Southwest Regional Solid Waste Management District.

The grant came from the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology. The announcement of the award to the Upper Southwest was made in a release from the PC&E and Gov. Mike Huckabee.

The money for the grant is paid in by the state's solid waste management districts and redistributed for use in recycling projects.

Joe Ball, waste facility manager, said the money would be used by the Upper Southwest to buy equipment for its recycling programs. According to Ball, the district paid in $2.50 per ton of handled waste to the state, with $1 of this money going to the post -closure care fund for landfills. The other $1.50 went to the state's recycling fund.

Once the administrative costs of the districts has been taken out of the fund, the remainder is redistributed in the form of grants to the waste districts.

According to the release, Huckabee said the grants program has made a great impact on the state's progress in exceeding the recycling goal of 30 percent of Arkansas' 1991 solid waste stream by 1995. The recycling goal is 40 percent by the year 2000.

"Due to the increase in curbside collection programs," Huckabee said, "added emphasis on business and industry recycling and ongoing and expanded education programs, the state achieved a 36 percent recycling rate for 1996."

Since the beginning of the grants program, almost $16 million has been returned to Arkansas' 17 solid waste districts.

Programs eligible for the grant program include: waste management planing integrating recycling; public information and education programs encouraging waste reduction and stimulating demands for products made from recycled materials; waste transfer facili ties integrating recycling into their operations; recycling and composting equipment; and recycling and market development programs.