Houston Starts National Recycling Contest for Ike Debris

The city of Houston is sponsoring a nationwide contest for the best ideas about how to recycle the 5.6 million cubic yards of tree waste resulting from Hurricane Ike, according to the Houston Chronicle.

With payouts of $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 for the top three ideas, the city is searching for unique ideas to reuse the wood in an environmentally friendly manner. Ideas will be accepted until the end of October.

“We want to come up with completely out-of-the-box concepts that can create new markets and scale up existing markets,” said Cris Eugster, the mayor’s chief officer for sustainable growth. “And we want something that can be implemented sooner rather than later.”

City officials say the amount of wood is large enough to fill up the Astrodome almost four times.

“We don’t want to have to fill up our precious landfill sites with a bunch of wooded waste, so we’re going to try to recycle all of it,” White said. “It will probably be the single biggest recycling project that there is in the country this year.”

Dallas-based Living Earth Technology Co. and Phoenix-based Allied Waste have agreed to accept a total of 700,000 cubic yards of waste for composting and resale.

You can learn more about recycling efforts with Earth911.