Rising hoop star, recycling issues, winter storms

Slam Dunk to the Beach basketball tournament at Cape Henlopen High School has showcased many great high school players through the years.  

LeBron James, a Slam Dunk veteran and now the brightest light in the NBA’s lineup of stars, is arguably the best basketball player to ever play in any of Cape’s gyms.

But in the future, Jonathan Kuminga, who plays for Our Savior New American in New York, may be heard of frequently in conversations that also include James.

Kuminga stood out in this year’s tournament like somebody playing at a different level than everyone else, most notably in his record-breaking 40-point performance in a slim loss to Gonzaga of Washington, D.C.

At one point Kuminga spied a clear lane to the hoop. He launched himself somewhere around the free-throw line, executing a 360-degree one-handed windmill with the ball while in mid-air, soaring above the basket and slamming the ball through the net, all to the delight of a spellbound crowd that erupted into ecstatic and appreciative hoots and hollers.

The Congo native is only 15 now but has the build and finesse of a winner.  

Remember that name Kuminga. Basketball fans will be hearing it plenty in the years ahead.

Recycling in Delaware

Mike Parkowski of Delaware’s Solid Waste Authority spoke to members of Lewes-Rehoboth Rotary Club Monday night.  He said with the 2011 state law requiring all trash haulers to also provide recycling containers for their customers, there are now more than 368,000 households in Delaware recycling.  That amounts to about 100,000 tons of material taken annually to the state’s one Material Recovery Facility at the Delaware end of the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

He said the biggest problem the center has is separating out materials that people think are recyclable but aren’t.  

As a result, the sorting machines end up getting fouled with items like plastic wrap and the thin plastic bags used by many grocery stores.  He said the machines end up sorting out about 16 percent of all the materials because they aren’t recyclable. That amounts to about 16,000 tons which have to be retrucked to a state landfill. “That’s better than the-national average, which is over 20 percent rejects,” said Parkowski.  “We’d like to get that number down to 10 percent but we’re not there yet.”

Parkowski said plastic grocery bags are recyclable but not through the sorting center.  He said most stores have bins where the bags can be returned for recycling.

The other major problem that results in items being rejected is contamination with food.  “We can take lots of the harder plastics, metal containers, cardboard, paper - but no styrofoam and no food containers that still have food residue in them.  

That just doesn’t work for recycling.

“I know some people who tear the uncontaminated lids off pizza boxes to recycle because they know the bottoms - unless they’ve been protected with liners - can’t be recycled because of grease that seeps into the cardboard.”

He said demand for recycled materials is at a low point.  “China makes lots of things and was a big user in the past but they’ve cut way back,” said Parkowski. “With demand low, it’s even more important that what we do bale up for reuse is clean; otherwise it will be rejected.

So, If you have any doubt about whether anything can be recycled, keep it out.  

The weather ahead

Snowstorms like the one that covered our area last weekend get people’s attention because for a few hours - and often longer - they transform the appearance of our landscape.  The storms can have their beautiful moments and their treacherous moments but they undoubtedly bring a change of pace.

This fall, weather forecasters at AccuWeather, which provides weather services for the Cape Gazette, said winter would start off relatively mild through December and on into January. But then, they said, patterns would shift and we could expect to see moisture-laden systems coming across the southern part of the country and colliding with increasingly colder air drifting down from Canada.

They said we should expect a few more wintry events late in January and further into February.

So far the forecasters have been on the mark, so we will see what’s in store for us over the next six weeks, especially considering we have a real cold blast coming our way.

Over the past few decades, our biggest snowstorms of winter have most often come late in January and early in February.  Stay tuned.