Picture enough garbage to fill up the entire
Rose Bowl, once every 45 days, and you'll have an idea how much trash Orange Countians generate daily. Today, the county Board of Supervisors and OC Waste & Recycling challenged the 3 million people here to reduce by 10 percent the up to 15 million pounds of solid waste they deposit into local landfills each day.
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The Waste Free OC, Save Room for Tomorrow campaign kicked off this morning at Irvine's Frank R. Bowerman Landfill, where Janet
Nguyen, chairwoman of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, Alisa
Drakodaidis, deputy CEO of Orange County, and Mike Giancola, director
of OC Waste & Recycling, led the charge to convince residents they should throw away fewer paper coffee
cups, plastic bags, food waste and anything else that might wind up at the dump. More recycling was also encouraged.
To help meet individual goals, people were directed to the campaign's new website,
WasteFreeOC.com, which offers tips, resources and easy ways to reduce waste. Residents can also sign up for the “10% in 2010 Challenge” on the site.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.