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Got called out at a city council meeting for counting my recycling wrong, now I actually know what happens to it
About four months ago I stood up at a council meeting here in Flagstaff to brag about how our street was recycling more than ever, and a woman from the county waste office said flat out that half of what we put in the blue bins gets pulled out and burned anyway because of contamination. I sat down pretty fast. I went home and dumped our bin on a tarp in the driveway, and sure enough there were plastic bags, greasy pizza boxes, and a garden hose in there. I started printing the actual sorting guide from the county website, taping it above the bin, and now our family of four is down from two pickup bags a week to about half of one. The weird part is that cutting the junk out means the stuff that can really be recycled actually gets sold instead of landfilled, which cuts real emissions, not just the feel good kind. If your town does single stream pickup like ours, do you know where your stuff actually ends up, or are you guessing like I was? I would love to hear from anyone in a city that started checking bins and fining folks, because that woman's comment is still stuck in my head.
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david7038d ago
That line about guessing like I was hits home because I did the exact same thing for years and just assumed the blue bin meant it all got recycled. Then I read about how one greasy box or plastic bag can wreck a whole load, and it made me think twice about what I toss in there. So yeah, I get why that woman's comment is stuck in your head, once you know better it's hard to go back to not caring.
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