Getting greener by the day

After a tough campaign, newly elected Village Trustee Emilio Grillo, who was named liaison to the Department of Public Works, has begun looking for ways to reduce Rockville Centre’s carbon footprint.

Grillo, whose electoral platform focused heavily on beautification, said he has been working closely with DPW Superintendent Harry Weed to find ways to improve the village’s recycling program. “We’re talking about potentially putting recycling bins — provided that they’re aesthetically OK — in public places,” Grillo said. “It’ll increase people’s awareness. It’ll also promote more recycling. And we hope to generate more revenue that way.

“As far as statistics,” he added, “this is something that’s going to be implemented in the very near future.”

Weed, echoing Grillo, noted that home recycling programs will also expand. “We’re ordering new boxes for paper, for residential paper and cardboard,” Weed said. “And cans for bottles, cans and plastics, to try to make it more appealing, and make it so that residents will utilize the can and try to entice them to recycle more.”

The program, Weed explained, will go even further. He and Grillo plan to rewrite the village informational packet on recycling to make it more comprehensive and more enjoyable to read. They also hope to work with village businesses to improve their own recycling programs — which Grillo thinks would be mutually.

“I think there’s a large amount of revenue that is just unrealized,” he said. “And I think that we can really capitalize on that without bringing much hardship.”

News of the program overhaul comes only two weeks after the first meeting of the new Board of Trustees, to which Trustee Ed Oppenheimer brought a shopping bag filled with recyclables in order to raise awareness of the issue.

“[There were] accumulated junk mail, envelopes from regular mail, cereal boxes, spaghetti box, cake mix box, etcetera, that we accumulated in one week,” said Oppenheimer. “And what I was saying was, there are about 6,000 single-family homes in Rockville Centre. … That’s easily a thousand tons of paper per year, just from the residential district, that could be removed from the stream.”

Weed said that he and Grillo are willing to accept help from all sides, and that it’s possible that, in time, they would reach out to groups like the Rockville Centre Conservancy for help with some of their efforts.

But when it comes to the program itself, Weed said, residents won’t be kept waiting too much longer. “We’re pretty much going at it full bore,” he said.