By ANTONIO MAGGIORE
Los Alamos County Councilor
It’s looking like spring is finally here, and I honestly couldn’t be happier about it. I love spring, especially after such a nice wet winter.
All over Los Alamos and White Rock flowers and trees can already be seen blooming with an intensity and eagerness not seen for some time. This is looking to be an especially verdant summer all over not just our beautiful County, but our scenic state as a whole.
However, there’s more than just the myriad shades of green our landscape provides that has me excited for the next few months. This spring and summer has the potential to be one of our County’s greenest ever. Now I’m not talking about our yards, our forests, or our parks, I’m talking about our trash footprint.
This past Saturday, Pajarito Environmental Education Center hosted our annual Earth Day Celebration. As always, it was a wonderful event for people of all ages, but it was also our first Zero Waste event, and it was a huge success. Zero Waste doesn’t mean that no trash was produced, but it does mean that the maximum amount possible was diverted to recycling and composting.
How was this accomplished? Through the hard work of a lot of dedicated and passionate citizens and County employees.
It involved helping to educate all the attendees about what in the usual handful of trash was actually divertable. This is an exciting endeavor that has come out of our Environmental Sustainability Board, and I thank them and staff for their hard work in seeing it through to such a resounding success. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Our ESB is not satisfied with just doing one event, they have set their sights much higher.
We are trying to make every summer concert show a Zero Waste event. This can only be really successful if everyone in the community understands what we are doing and how. Be on the lookout for Zero Waste stations at the concerts this summer. They will be staffed by friendly and dedicated volunteers looking to make a difference in our trash footprint as well as spreading some education.
With some help from everyone in the community we can all pitch in to make this our greenest season yet. Big changes always start with small steps. I encourage everyone to take an extra second when packing for the concerts, and think about whether you are doing all you can to help us make as little trash as possible. It’s worth the effort.
