January 16, 2011
Delaware people: Todd tenacious advocate for recycling legislation
Pat Todd started working behind the scenes in the 1970s and hasn't stopped
In politics, timing can be everything.
Just ask Pat Todd.
In the late 1970s, efforts to get a state bottle bill adopted stalled. Todd and a group from the League of Women Voters scheduled a meeting with the state Farm Bureau to discuss the proposal.
Turns out, the then-president of the bureau spent the morning replacing a flat tire on his tractor -- an expensive and time-consuming proposition three decades ago. The culprit in the flat: a broken bottle or severed steel can.
Todd knew she had him on her side.
"He was very supportive," Todd recalled. But "there were a great many people who were against it."
Back then, Delaware's back roads were littered with steel cans and whole and broken bottles. Shards of glass ended up in pastures -- where animals were grazing -- and in planted fields. Todd and others, including the late Rep. Gwynne P. Smith, thought there had to be a better way.
Their idea was to get people to recycle beverage containers and encourage it by charging a refundable deposit. For more than three decades, that has been Todd's volunteer mission: finding a better way to handle Delaware's trash.
For her efforts to move the state toward recycling, The News Journal is honoring her as one of its 50 Who Matter, a list of Delaware's unsung heroes -- people who make a difference in all of our lives.
"She really has her finger on everything environmental," said longtime friend and fellow environmental advocate Lorraine Fleming.
She tells the Pat Todd story like this: The two women met in the Niagara Falls area of New York decades ago. Fleming's husband, Richard, and Todd's late husband, Bill, were lab partners at a DuPont Co. facility there.
Fleming was involved in water resources issues when she met Todd.
"I talked her into joining the League of Women Voters," she said.
Then, with Todd in the ranks, Fleming said she moved on to other interests. But she left the league in good hands.
Todd stayed active in the civic organization for decades -- in New York and then in Delaware -- and over the years became a champion for many of the First State's key environmental issues -- among them recycling and energy policy.
http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20110116/NEWS02/101160351/A-tenacious-advocate-for-recycling
