Governor Signs Executive Order Promoting Recycling
Governor Glenn Youngkin today signed Executive Order #17, which promotes recycling, reducing waste and encourages the creation and relocation of clean technology companies that are involved in recycling-related issues to Virginia.
The order calls on food manufacturers, grocery retailers, sports arenas, schools, hotels and banquet facilities to identify appropriate strategies to reduce food waste. The Executive Order repeals Governor Northam’s Executive Order #77, removing the burdensome restriction on single-use plastic at state agencies, colleges and universities. The order also directs State Parks to examine ways to create more recycling opportunities.
“Too often in the past, Virginia has been presented with a false choice between saving our environment and growing our economy. The growing market for post-consumer recyclables demonstrates that we can do both,” said Governor Glenn Youngkin. “We need to bridge that disconnect to better conserve our natural resources, reduce waste that goes out to landfills and promote new clean energy jobs here in Virginia. We should be focusing our resources and energy on providing a cleaner supply of recyclable materials.”
Read the full text of Executive Order Number Seventeen here.
April 10, 2022 @ 8:47 am
Terrific that Governor Youngkin is taking these bold steps toward the need to recycle and proposing solutions to make recycling easier.
This would be an excellent time to take the next bold step: Address the human factor: We have become dependent on the convenience of single use plastic products, and until this is dependency is recognized and identified as a contributing factor, all recycling efforts are simply lulling ourselves in to thinking we are “actually doing something”. We are, and all current efforts should robustly continue, but it is not enough. It has been said that we can’t recycled our way out of this. Addressing our individual dependencies on single use plastics would make the production of these products less economically attractive to producers of these items, resulting in less single use products choking our landfills and floating down our streams.