Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Emily Ditty and Tom had a great meeting with Lauren
Abernethy, marketing director for West Towne Mall and Josh
Williams, marketing director for Knoxville Center Mall.
We discussed ways to get the Don't Throw Down slogan into the
mall. At first we had this one idea, but they had a number of
great suggestions to get the slogan into the food courts, other parts of
the malls and near the theatres.
- posted by KKB staff at 5:15 PM
KKB board president Page Pratt-Greene and executive director Tom
Salter met today with Knox County Attorney General Randy Nichols
to discuss increasing the number of litter cases his office
prosecutes. It was a very productive meeting. Stay tuned for
more developments.
- posted by KKB staff at
11:05 AM
Saturday, Saturday, May 28, 2005
We had a really nice article in the News Sentinel today, page
B8, entitled The Young and the Litter Conscious. Normally I
would link to the article on the News Sentinel website, but they don't
stay active very long and by the time you look you would have to
subscribe and pay for the article. So you have to trust me - it
was a really good article. They interviewed Tom Salter and County
Commissioner Paul Pinkston about the proposed program to involve
more youth in litter cleanups by offering them a modest financial
incentive. Get a copy and check it out. Oh, what the heck, here
is the link. Who knows how long it will last?
- posted by KKB staff at 6:45 AM
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Today is the BIG day for Laura's Excellent Trash Adventure.
She spent the morning with Kristi Falco (not pictured) at Keep
Blount Beautiful and then met Tom and Emily from KKB
at Allison Teeters' office at Keep Sevier Beautiful.
Allison has a really cool office on the 5th floor of a bank. The
office looks really professional and fitting for the 2nd place affiliate
in the nation for 2004. First, we went to lunch at Damon's
restaurant. It was nice. There was a little bear carved out
of coconut on our table. Do black bears encounter coconuts in the
wild? Anyway, Emily is holding one in the picture below (l-r:
Allison, Emily and Laura):
Then we sat in rocking chairs and changed shoes before visiting the Sevier
County Solid Waste Facility. Keep reading and you'll learn why
we changed shoes. We told Emily NOT to try the little chair but
she did not listen.
Next we drove to the Solid Waste Facility where we were met by Tom
Leonard, Sevier County Solid Waste Director, Keep Sevier
Beautiful board member and general great guy. This facility has a
reputation for smelling really bad, but it was very tolerable to
me. There was an odor that was kind of a cross between
non-composted organic material and a full garbage truck. It was
not overwhelming by any means. The first stop on the tour was the
tipping floor where Sevier County garbage trucks empty their
loads. A front-end loader places the material in openings in the
floor which are then fed into these gigantic
"digestors". Below, Emily, demonstrates the enormity of
the digestors - there are four of them.
You don't want to fall in the digestor. A giant hydraulic plunger
pushes all the trash from the trucks into the digestor. For every
5 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) they add 1 ton of class B sludge
from the water treatment plant. Class B is NOT raw sewage - it has
already been treated at the waste water plant to reduce most pathogens
and is approved by EPA for some agricultural uses. Anyway the digestors rotate and reach temperatures of 150 to 160 degrees (133
degrees is required to kill pathogens). The digestors are
huuuuuuuuge! If you've ever been to Huntsville and seen the rocket
park you get some idea of the size.
After 3 days in the digestor, the stuff comes out the other end - it is
just like a slow version of...you know...a digestor...never mind.
Some wimpy members of our tour (Allison and Emily) wouldn't enter this
room. Most of the inorganic material is removed at this point -
bottle caps, plastic containers, some glass and assorted trash (above
right) and that stuff goes to the landfill. The organic material
moves on a conveyer belt to a storage room where it remains for at least
28 days. We did NOT visit that room. The material is turned
regularly and air is forced through the piles of material from the digestors.
This room is vented with big blowers (above left) and the stinky air is
pushed through underground pipes and forced up through a bio filter made
of wood chips and mulch (above right). There was absolutely no
odor outside the facility. This mulch is turned and replaced on a
regular basis. Right next to the bio filters was a great batch of
thistles. Tom Leonard is explaining how big the thistles always
get.
Finally, the composted organic material is moved by conveyer belt to the
product room. Below left is what comes out with some pretty big
pieces of glass (about 1" chunks). On the right is the
compost after it is screened. This material is used by landscaping
firms and builders as a soil ammendment. It was dry, fluffy and
had very little odor.
What they can't sell is used as cover material for the Sevier County
landfill. Shown below is a truck loading up with compost to be
taken to the landfill (below right). Tom Leonard told us that
grass planted on the compost grows much better than on topsoil. If
you have any questions about the tour call KKB and we can give you more
details.
Then we all drove home with the windows open.
- posted by KKB staff at 7:15 PM
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Today was a big day for KKB. We had a visit from Laura
Marzahl from Keep Tennessee Beautiful. Laura is touring
Keep America Beautiful affiliates in East Tennessee and stopped
by to see a typical day for Keep Knoxville Beautiful. We
(Laura, Emily and Tom) started out by doing some covered load
observations at the John Sevier Convenience Center in South
Knoxville. This is the start of a major covered load behavior
initiative planned for this year. In about 1 hour we observed 71
vehicles enter the site to drop off their trash. There were 25
cars, 32 trucks, 8 SUVs, 6 vans and 1 vehicle pulling a trailer.
Overall, 65% of the vehicles were fully secured, but that includes the
cars, vans and SUVs. Only 25% of the trucks were fully
secured. Here are some pictures from the observation:
Then we went to lunch at Riverside Tavern for a budget committee
meeting. Present were Cassandra McGee, Jenny Raines, Tim
Wheeler, Sarah Surak and Martha Dooley. Laura sat
in. Tom and Emily were there from the staff.
The committee approved the budget to bring to the full board in
June. It includes ambitious goals for Orchids & Onions
sponsorships but otherwise is pretty conservative. Here is a
picture of the meeting:
Then we went on the Don't Throw Down on K-TOWN tour of Knoxville.
First we drove up Broadway near the Food Co-Op and took a
picture of Emily and Laura in front of one of our DTD
billboards. Then we went to World's Fair Park and put DTD
stickers on all the trash cans. (We got permission from the Public
Building Authority to do this - thanks PBA for helping us promote
the slogan and litter prevention). Below is a picture of Laura
putting a sticker on a can. We got Laura to do most of them.
We hope visitors to World's Fair Park
like the slogan because the stickers are more or less everywhere now!
- posted by KKB staff at 4:30 PM
Friday, May 20, 2005
Tom gave a speech to a group of Master Gardeners attending
a conference at the UT Ag Campus. The topic was Securing
Funding for Community Beautification Projects. The successful
projects by South Knox Beautification Committee, the Halls
Business and Professional Association and the Bearden
Beautification Committee were used as examples.
- posted by KKB staff at 2:00 PM
Thursday, May 19, 2005
KKB board president Page Pratt- Greene and executive
director Tom Salter had a very promising meeting with Knox
County Sheriff Tim Hutchison on increasing the number of litter
citations written in the County. Watch for more developments on
this issue.
- posted by KKB staff at 1:30 PM
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
The Orchids & Onions Committee met today at Chesapeake's
to start planning this fall's awards program. Board members
present included: Keith Austin, Ken Bodie, Mary Lou Horner, Cassandra
McGee, Gary Loe, Harold Byrd and Sam Maynard. Tom and
Emily attended from staff. A number of changes were discussed
including: moving the event to the early evening instead of lunch,
securing sponsors for each of the Orchid Awards instead of the whole
event, pre-screening the nominees to make the selection process more
exclusive, raising the ticket price to $30 or $35 and adding a cash
bar. We still plan to use The Foundry and have reserved the
date for October 11th. We will also be talking to the News
Sentinel about making the Environmental Achievement Awards
regional.
- posted by KKB staff at 1:45 PM
Friday, May 13, 2005
We had the meeting today to plan the 4th Annual Flag Day Ceremony.
The program is a partnership with KKB, Knox County, the City of
Knoxville, Allen Sign Company, B.P.O.E. Lodge #160 and Company D. 4th
Combat Engineer Battalion, United States Marine Corps
Reserve. The event will be held June 11 and will include an
official U.S. flag retirement ceremony. Citizens may drop off worn
out flags at a number of locations before the event. Click
here for drop-off locations and other details on the event.
- posted by KKB staff at 11:30 AM
Thursday, May 12, 2005
This was a pretty busy day. It started with a public hearing
on a new ordinance for dealing with junk and non-running vehicles in
Knox County. This is being spearheaded by County Commissioner
Larry Clark. Attending the meeting was Bruce Wheithrich,
head of Knox County Engineering, Helen Harb of the Kidney
Foundation and Tom Salter of KKB. At this time
the County will try out a voluntary program for removal of junk
cars. Codes officials will give violators a warning and a list of
groups that will remove a car at no cost to the owner.
Then Tom had lunch with County Commissioner Paul Pinkston and Bob
Santore. Commissioner Pinkston pitched an idea to
establish a fund to provide a financial reward to youth groups that pick
up litter. The KKB board of directors will be looking at this
proposal to figure out what role we can play in this project.
Finally, the Earthfest steering committee met to review this
year's event and make some preliminary plans for the future. In
spite of quite cold weather, the event was a success. A possible
theme for 2006 would focus on the role individuals play in environmental
issues such as air and water quality, global warming, energy
conservation, waste reduction, etc. and what our responsibilities are to
take care of the earth.
- posted by KKB staff at 9:15 PM
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
The Talking Tree is back in action thanks to our program
coordinator Emily Ditty. The Talking Tree made a visit to
the Lyons
Creek Baptist Church Mother's Day Out Program. The kids
loved it, the Mother's Day Out staff loved it and The Talking
Tree Loved it. Here are some pictures we grabbed off the Lyons
Creek website:
- posted by KKB staff at 2:30 PM
Thursday, May 5, 2005
We had our regular monthly board meeting today and are pleased to
announce the following officers have been elected for the 2005-2006
fiscal year: Cassandra McGee for president, Harold Byrd
for president-elect, Mark Cawood for internal vice-president, Terry
Faulkner for external vice-president, Martha Dooley for
Treasurer and Sarah Surak for Secretary. The board also
approved a resolution to ask KPD's Chief Owen and Knox
County's Sheriff Hutchison to ask their uniformed patrol officers to
write at least one litter citation a year for active littering from a
vehicle or for having an unsecured load. We will not be asking the
officers to make litter their #1 priority or to investigate illegal
dumping or dirty lots - just write one citation each for the types of
littering that only they can do something about. New board members
were also elected and their names will be listed after they have all
been notified.
Today was a busy day. We had a booth at the Knoxville Chamber
Partnership Business Showcase. It was a lot of fun and we had
a great location. In addition to our booth our friends at KORRnet
and The Arts and Culture Alliance had booths near us. Here
are some pics from the Showcase: (l-r) Emily Ditty at the KKB booth,
Curtis Dorrie at the KORRnet booth and Liza Zenni and Suzanne
Cada of the Arts & Culture (our landlord at The Emporium).
- posted by KKB staff at 7:15 PM
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
This morning we had a visit from Sarah Surak (KKB board
member, graduate student and UTK's recycling coordinator) and the two
graduate students that are doing a study of the three year old Youth
Advisory Board. This program has had successes and
disappointments over the three years. A major finding of the study
is that staff turnover has a negative impact on the participation of YAB
members in the program. Up to now the KKB executive director and
board members have has minimal contact with the group, relying on the
program coordinators and interns to do most of the work. This was
a deliberate decision because the coordinators and interns are closer in
age to the YAB members and theoretically would have a closer
relationship to them. Next year the KKB executive director and
board members will have more contact with the group - maybe not every
meeting, but on some type of regular schedule.
- posted by KKB staff at 2:30 PM