Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 17, 2012
Neil Seldman, ILSR president, and Bob Gedert, Director of the Department of Resource Recovery, Austin, TX, were interviewed at length for a front page Cleveland Plain Dealer article on the city’s proposed waste-to-energy pelletization and gasification plant.
Seldman and Gedert have made presentations to Cleveland citizens, environmental organizations and individual City Council members including City Council President Martin Sweeney. Seldman presented information on companies that are interested in locating in Cleveland if recycled materials and old products were made available to them. Gedert presented a business plan for zero waste and economic development about to be implemented in Austin. Collection, processing, new rules, rate structures, and incentives were discussed during numerous meetings.
Ohio Citizen Action, the Sierra Club, and Environmental Health Watch hosted Seldman and Gedert. These organizations coordinated the meetings in Cleveland as part of their long term effort to convince the Mayor and City Council to abandoned plans for a garbage incinerator and adopt an economic development approach to the resources in the city’s waste stream. This is exactly what the Austin did in 1986 as they started on the road to zero waste.
City Council President Sweeney invited Seldman and Gedert back to Cleveland in September to make a formal presentation to the full City Council.
