3 months ago
WASHINGTON (WUSA) --The U.S. Government is running record deficits, but there is one program being run by the House of Representatives that is all about 'savings', especially in a GREEN way.
Sure, you can find several GREEN items in the House Gift Shop, but there's a much bigger effort than meets the eye. In June 2007, The House of Representatives launched the 'Green The Capitol Program' in an effort to make big changes in the way they do their non-legislative business.
Jeff Ventura, the House of Representatives Communications Director, says, "If we're expecting the rest of America to make these changes in their own homes, the logic being that we need to try to make those changes here as well."
That means changing the habits of hundreds of congressman and the thousands of staffers that work for them. Ventura told 9NEWS NOW, "You need to really make it a partnership, not only with the people who are working on that greening initiative, but also with the people that we're serving."
In the office of the 'Green The Capitol' program, they're on a mission. There's six and half million square feet of office space, and their job is to reduce the carbon foot print, reduce the amount of waste and reduce the energy used.
Ventura adds that there are, "CFL light bulbs across the campus, fully recycled paper in all house offices, so we're really moving ahead with some dramatic changes. One of the biggest waste streams that we have is actually from out cafeteria operation which is gigantic. We have almost a million visitors a year come to the Capitol, all of which are hungry and generate a lot of waste.
That waste is sorted into compostable and non-compostable and this $50,000 pulper really cuts down on the volume of that garbage. You might have seen a plastic utensil go in the pulper, but Brandon Talafaro says that's OK.
"Yeah, it's made out of corn starch."
Six hundred and sixty tons of waste went through the pulper last year, of which 440 tons were turned into high quality topsoil.
Jeff Ventura concludes, "There's two reasons why we're doing this: one for the long term benefits of reducing energy usage, and two, because it's the right thing to do."
9NEWS NOW and wusa9.com
