Atlanta visitors bring lots of money to town, but they leave
lots of waste behind.
To help the city’s downtown hotels make better use of
their refuse, the
Community Affairs, the
other state agencies joined the
hospitality industry to form the Georgia Hospitality
Environmental Partnership.
One of the partnership’s projects is helping hotels get
rid of soap barrels.
Nine barrels a month don’t sound like much for a large
hotel like Atlanta’s Westin
Peachtree Plaza to worry about. But over a year, those
barrels add up to more than a ton
of garbage in local landfills.
Managers at the Westin, one of GHEP’s pilot hotels,
chose not to ignore the bright blue
and white plastic barrels, which hold concentrated laundry
detergent. Instead, they
decided to use them.
“It was a simple concept, but hard to implement,” said
Jeff Darrow, DCA’s
GHEP program manager. First, the Westin reused as many
drums as they could as recycling
cans and trash cans.
But they soon ran out of ways to reuse them. GHEP and
the Westin worked with the
supplier to return the barrels to the detergent
manufacturers for reuse.
The supplier had a program to allow for their return.
But the Westin would have to
stockpile 30 barrels before sending them back. Storing
that many of the 55-, 25- and
5-gallon drums was too cumbersome.
Storage was a problem for recycling them, too. The
barrels filled the recycling
container and left no room for the hotel’s other
plastics.
Bobby Wilson, a Fulton-DeKalb County extension agent
with the UGA
and Environmental Sciences,
heard of the problem. He offered another solution —
gardening.
First, Wilson and other metro extension agents used
barrels to create irrigation
systems in demonstration gardens and community gardens in
low-income neighborhoods. For
less than $20 — enough to buy a spigot and some tubing —
they could turn two of the
55-gallon drums into a drip irrigation system.
The agents used other barrels as composting bins. For
some of the bins, they simply cut
the tops off of the barrels and drilled holes in them to
provide air circulation.
For others, they drilled holes in both the tops and
bottoms. Then they cut a door in
the side and placed the barrel on a stand with a rod
running through the center. This
allowed them to mix composting materials easily by
rotating the barrel.
The composting bins are at work now in the
demonstration and community gardens. The
Extension Service can provide plans so others may reuse
barrels in similar ways.
Finally, Wilson and the other agents used the old
barrels to create “Circles of
Gardening.”
They cut the tops and bottoms off of each barrel. Then
they cut each into three
11.5-inch rings. They placed old newspapers or cardboard
on the ground, then set the rings
on top of them. The agents filled the rings with compost
and used them as bottomless
planters.
The first to develop this concept, the DeKalb County
agents are spreading the method
and its benefits throughout the country. The Urban
Gardening Program in Jackson, Miss., is
already using the idea.
The detergent drums are readily available. They’re used
not only by hotels, but also by
hospitals and others. The Extension Service uses more
barrels than the Westin can provide,
so Emory and Crawford Long hospitals and the Emory Inn and
Conference Center are pitching
in, too.
“This is a perfect example of how partnership should
work,” Darrow said.
“The Westin had a problem waste stream, and the Extension
Service saw an opportunity.
Now they’re sharing their experience so other businesses
and organizations can see the
opportunities, too.”
