Regional alliance talks trash Tuesday

The regionalism movement has been gaining steam, said the founding member of the Acadiana Regional Alliance Pete Yuan, president of IberiaBank in Lafayette.

The Alliance informally approved a mission statement at its monthly meeting Tuesday that was held at the Acadiana Regional Airport in Iberia Parish. The statement said “the Acadiana Regional Alliance is a community of parishes united for promoting the interest of our region. ARA identifies issues and develops initiatives which address the needs of our region. ARA works closely with our local, state and federal officials in advocating these initiatives.”

The Alliance represents eight South Louisiana parishes including Iberia, St. Martin, St. Mary, Jefferson Davis, Lafayette, St. Landry, Vermilion and Acadia.

“What we are doing is important and it’s important to get the news out there so people know about us,” Yuan said. “Politicians are beginning to pay attention and many of our Acadiana delegation is beginning to speak in terms of regionalism.”

Yuan said the group identified a list of priorities several months ago it felt were important to the region. As it proceeds with meetings, it is the intention of the alliance to develop task forces to find more information about these key issues.

One of those identified issues was solid waste management, and the alliance invited Mark Pope, environmental quality manager for Lafayette Consolidated Government, to give a presentation on the issue.  

Pope said a regional approach to solid waste management is tough. Pope said part of the reason it is a difficult regional issue is the “banana culture,” which he defined as “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody.” He said when parishes come together to deal with waste issues, it’s difficult to find one parish to take all the other parishes’ garbage.

Pope said the easy answer to a question of a sustainable approach to dealing with solid waste is simply recycling.

He said Lafayette parish sees a 55 percent waste reduction going into its landfills from recycling efforts, 12 percent from household recycling, 30 percent from yard waste pickup and up to 13 percent from other recycling efforts like Christmas trees and phone books.

Pope also talked about many different approaches to treating solid waste such as incineration, which although he said was an effective method, remains expensive. ‘In-vessel’ composting, which greatly reduces the volume of garbage going into landfills, has a much higher cost per ton.