After the gifts have been opened and the holidays are gone, Frisco residents annually are left with a nagging question:

What do you do with the Styrofoam?

One solution: If you can’t completely solve a problem, minimize it.

That’s what is happening at Frisco Environmental Services, where Manager Jeremy Starritt came up with a creative way to make the best of a bad situation.

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By Bill Sullivan

Finding enough money to provide citizens with top-notch facilities and services is always a challenge, especially in these economically trying times. In Frisco, some creative thinking and deft planning has helped relieve some of the pressure on those precious funds.

The City is in the final phase of implementing six projects funded by an Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant (EECBG), part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The $825,800 award was obtained through a collaboration of City departments, each of which offered input into how they might make their facilities a bit more environmentally friendly.

By Bill Sullivan

If you have paid a visit to the Computer Lab at Frisco Public Library over the last year or so, you probably noticed some changes.

It’s cooler. (Literally.) Quieter, too. You may even have taken note of a lot more leg room under the tables now that those space-eating, noise-making, heat-producing Central Processing Units are mostly a thing of the past. (A few remain for training purposes.)

“The lab was a very noisy place, needless to say, with 30 some-odd computers whirring along and fans running everywhere,” Library Systems Coordinator Gary Werchan says. “Now, as you can hear, that’s clearly no longer the case.

“You can barely hear a pin drop in here some days. It’s a lot more pleasant environment to work in than it was before.”

Currently, Frisco has two operating wastewater treatment plants. One has the capacity to produce five million gallons of water a day; the other is being expanded to handle 10 million gallons. The city also has obtained a Type 1 usage permit for the treated water, which allows the product to be used in close proximity to people.

“That’s essentially 15 million gallons of water a day that is available to us if we have the system to deliver it where the irrigation needs are,” Public Works Director Gary Hartwell said.

To that end, the Public Works Department has prepared a Reuse Master Plan, outlining where water lines could be installed all across Frisco over the next five years and on through the complete build-out of the city. In the short term, the focus is on locations adjacent to the park system and large school campuses that are in relatively close proximity to existing pipes.

By Bill Sullivan

In these more environmentally-savvy times, plenty of folks have taken up composting. Gather up those leftover fruit and vegetable parts, organize a pile in the corner of the backyard, and soon enough, you’ve turned your landfill-clogging garbage into something of real value.

But what to do if you have, say, 2 ½ tons of expired produce…per week? When the world’s largest retailer called with just that problem, Frisco-based Quest Recycling got to work.

“Some of the big companies – our competition – had the project on their desk for four months and hadn’t been able to come up with a solution,” Jason Smith, Marketing & Business Development Director for Quest, recalls. “I placed the first 34 test stores within two weeks.

“We created a new industry. No one had been doing that on a nation-wide scale of operations.”

By Bill Sullivan

You’ve probably seen them in and around town, those white Toyota Priuses with the “Frisco” logo on the side. They’re quiet, efficient…and, yes, a little more green that your average city fleet vehicle.

“They’ve done just fine,” Fleet Manager David McBurnett says. “The fuel economy with them, obviously, has been way up.”

The hybrids run part of the time on batteries and part on a conventional gasoline engine. Because they’re used mostly by city employees to get around town or the immediate area, the battery (which does most of the work at lower speeds) can offer real savings.