Curbside Recycling

All county government offices and services except police, fire and the 911 center will be closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day.There is no trash collection or curbside recycling on Christmas Day or New Year's Day, and MoRT, the mobile recycling truck, will not be in service. Regular trash collection and curbside recycling routes are in operation on Christmas Eve.For households with once-a-week trash collection on Fridays, the trash will be picked up the day after the holidays on Saturday, Dec. 26, and on Saturday, Jan. 2.Households with twice-a-week trash routes can put out a double load to be collected on their next regularly scheduled trash day.The 911 center, police and fire departments do not close on holidays and remain staffed 24-hours a day, seven days a week.

The Sykesville Recycling Committee will present its curbside recycling proposal at the Aug. 8 Town Council meeting."We plan to continue with our curbside recycling plans and stay at twice-weekly trash pickup," said Councilwoman Julie A. Kaus, who chairs the committee.Ms. Kaus said she has received many positive comments on the proposal, which will be available to town residents only.Plans call for a twice-monthly collection of recyclables. Haulers will pick up the recyclables from half the town on alternate Wednesdays.

Baltimore County launched a new phase of its rapidly expanding curbside recycling program yesterday by beginning a pilot project in Relay that substitutes a pickup of mixed paper and yard waste for one of two weekly trash collections.Instead of having two trash pickups a week, Relay residents will have what county officials are calling one-plus-one curbside recycling collection: one day for trash and one day for recyclables. Early yesterday, County Executive Roger B. Hayden kicked off the project by donning a bright orange jumpsuit and spending 45 minutes helping crews pick up recyclables in Relay.

TANEYTOWN - When construction ended last month on the city's $11,000 recycling center, nobody thought the facility could become obsolete in less than a year.The 900-square-foot recycling center in the middle of Taneytown Memorial Park is a first for this rapidly growing North Carroll city, one that has been discussed and anticipated for months on end.When the center opens early next month, residents will be able to drop off newspapers, cans, bottles and plastics, keeping them out of the county landfills.

Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, wearing crisp orange Sanitation Services overalls, watched yesterday as a contractor working for the city made his way along Rosalie Avenue, loading like treasure stuff the city only a week ago used to burn or bury.Moving from house to house, the contractor collected aluminum cans, bundles of newspaper and plastic milk cartons set out at the curbside, and dumped them into a hopper attached to the side of a garbage truck.Then, with a diesel groan, the truck's mechanical arms sent the contents of the hopper spilling into the truck's hold -- and sent the city of Baltimore into the age of curbside recycling.

The first phase of a uniform countywide curbside recycling program in Baltimore County begins next month when more than 10,000 households from Overlea to Perry Hall go to a schedule of one trash collection and one recycling pickup a week.By July 1, 1995, all 200,000 single-family and townhouse residences in the county will have the same "one and one" curbside recycling schedule. About 2,300 residences in the first-phase area now have some sort of recycling program.County Executive Roger B. Hayden, who announced the first-phase location Friday, said that after two years of experimenting with various schedules, "one and one" proved to be the most cost effective.

WHEN HOWARD and Baltimore county residents gained curbside recycling, they gave up one of their two trash-collection days. Sure, some people grumbled, but many saw it as an even swap. Anne Arundel County should have done the same when it began curbside recycling in 1991. But it didn't. Local governments started curbside recycling, after all, to discourage citizens from carelessly discarding reusable materials such as plastic, aluminum, cereal boxes and newspapers. Here, the message wasn't clear.

Barn fire is arson, fire marshal saysA fire that destroyed a 30-by-60-foot metal pole barn northwest of Manchester last week was declared arson by the state fire marshal's office Friday, said Bob Thomas, chief deputy state fire marshal.The fire, in the 3700 block of Back Woods Road, was discovered shortly after 2 p.m. Tuesday by a neighbor, who said he who saw his cow run through a wire fence as it apparently tried to escape dense smoke from the barn.Farm equipment stored in the barn was destroyed in the blaze, which also scorched a larger barn about 25 feet away and burned some brush across a driveway.

Baltimore County residents disappointed by County NTC Executive Roger B. Hayden's decision to delay implementing countywide curbside recycling may take some comfort from an article by writer Lynn Scarlett that appears elsewhere on this page today. Scarlett argues persuasively that the benefits of recycling, while real, should not be overestimated, and that communities must balance carefully a number of factors in deciding whether recycling's benefits justify its costs.Baltimore County has already moved decisively to reduce solid wastes 20 percent by 1994.

Annapolis began its first curbside recycling program early yesterday.In the Admiral Heights neighborhood, three men emptied plastic bins full of bottles and cans into a trailer hooked to the back of a city dump truck.By 11 a.m., they had finished emptying bins left out by residents of about half of the neighborhood's 675 homes."It went absolutely great," said Frank Biba, assistant to the chief of operations of the public works department.Admiral Heights is the only city neighborhood participating in the program, a pilot for an eventual citywide curbside recycling effort.