Primarily Rye Field

Courtenay is honored to be one of twenty members of this year’s Leadership Franklin class. A major part of the curriculum includes a group project and her team is focused on improving the City of Franklin’s Blue Bag recycling program. The goal of the project is to increase the diversion rate, or the amount of material being diverted from the landfill. This translates into real money going directly back into our local budget.

The somewhat overused green mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” translates to minimizing the take from our planet. The blue part of the equation means not just remaining neutral in our taking of resources, but actually adding back to our precious planet, in particular, our own community.

Franklin’s Blue Bag recycling program successfully achieves the goals to reduce and recycle, but what we find most appealing is the “blue” aspect of the project.  One should be applauded for contributing to energy neutrality, but if we all went a step further by adding resources back to our community (like the blue bag program does), we give back to the greater community in a more substantive way.

By increasing the diversion rate, Franklin will save tax payers money by decreasing the amount of trips to the landfill located in Murfreesboro. You can imagine the market position of developing a program that not only reduces waste, energy consumption and cost, but actually creates new revenue for the city that otherwise would be costing the residents. This results in a more robust financial balance sheet, expansion of municipal opportunity and greater job growth potential.

Primarily Rye will donate our design time to an awareness piece that highlights the kind of items that can be recycled. We have our 85 year-old grandmother recycling everything she gets her hands on, so it shouldn’t be too hard for the rest of our town, right?

Blue Bag logo by Klatt2Design