Our area has private trash service–there are a couple of companies that do it. Every house has a trash bin and a recyclables bin, and it’s a little extra for a yard waste bin (but it’s a low cost, well worth it) that goes out to a giant composting operation outside of town. If you didn’t have a yard waste bin you’d be expected to take care of it yourself by composting or carrying it out somehow–I don’t think they would take it in the trash.
Sort of. My complex has a trash company that puts out a few large bins…nowhere near my building, though. The city has a recycling program, but when you go to the Denver link for it and input your address, nothing happens and you can’t sign up for service.
Why don’t you “bother” with it? This doesn’t make sense to me, but then, I view not recycling when it’s available as being about akin to littering. Of course if you litter, too, that won’t mean anything to you…
I have curbside recycling pickup on alternate weeks and pickup is next Monday. Also schools here have bins for newspaper collecting for extra cash.
As you might expect, Madison (and its surrounding suburbs) have curbside recycling. In the suburb I live in, the houses have garbage-can-sized recycling bins that are collected every two weeks. You don’t have to sort, and they accept pretty much everything, including all plastics 1-7. The only thing they don’t take are pizza boxes, apparently because the grease makes them unrecycleable.
I first saw curbside recycling growing up in suburban Cincinnati, moving there in the late 1980s, and every place I’ve lived since has had curbside recycling.
The city I live in has single sort recycling. However, like a lot of US cities they fail to recycle any plastics except necked bottles. Basically it is paper, cardboard, glass, steel, aluminum, and milk bottles. I wish more plastics were included since such a large percentage of the waste stream is plastic packaging.
(haha! Our recycling takes 1-8! so there!)
Is this universal? Because we’ve always put pizza boxes in with the recycling but if it’s just making work for someone to haul them back out we’ll stop.
Every place I’ve ever lived which had recycling explicitly said that anything contaminted with food or oils was not acceptable. No pizza boxes, no styro chinese containers with sauce still stuck to them, no foil frozen lasagna trays, no plastic bottles which used to have motor oil in them, etc.
If you wanted to take the time to wash out the styro chinese containers or motor oil bottles you could. But odds are the recycling plant would still pick them out & landfill them anyhow since they’re not going to take the time to determine whether you’re the 1% who washes them or the 99% who don’t.
To be completely honest, I did not know about this. Of course I try to clean out most of food stuff. I don’t think it would be possible to completely eliminate inherent/residual grease from all recyclables; I wonder how difficult and costly for them to degrease.
From what I understand, and I’m not an expert, anything greasy simply gets shuttled aside & goes to the landfill. So by throwing greasy or food-encrusted stuff in the recycling instead of the trash, you’re just increasing their costs and the stuff ends up in the same place it would if you’d handled it correctly & trashed it yourself.
Check with your local recycling agency. They should have pretty clear info to guide people on what they can take and in what condition.
In NYC, we have pretty good curbside recycling. A while back, they were very strict on the no food or oil soiled stuff, like LSLGuy mentioned, but in recent recycling guides, they have eased up on this and now take items like pizza boxes. Maybe the system has gotten better?
At our rural-ish place in Western NY, there is curbside recycling, but it is limited in what it takes. I do it, but some days it feels like “why even bother?”
At work, we have single stream recycling, and it is the best thing ever.
Yes we do. We have to use clear trash bags in securely covered trash cans. We have separate recycling cans and have no sort recycling (paper, metal, glass - all in one container). The center sorts for us. The clear bags are so they can make sure we’re not throwing out any recyclables.
We also have a 24/7 yard waste drop off site and 6 week in spring and 6 weeks in fall of curbside yard waste pickup.
All in all, it’s pretty damn fair and easy.
My mom lives in the city (Worcester) and they have pay as you throw - she has to buy specific city trash bags (which cost about $1.50 each!) and she has sort recycling (she has to do the sorting).
Clear trash bag could get pretty nasty looking especially in hot weather… as well as umm… revealing (?), ie, it wouldn’t be as mindless act as throwing all your garbage into black or white plastic bags (often, especially when I don’t have much trash, I just leave out my trash bags instead of dragging our large trash can out to the curbside)… anyone object to this change?
Actually, clear or translucent. I forgot to mention that. A lot of people objected but mostly apartment owners who knew they’d be penalized if their tenants didn’t comply.
Apparently there will be fines if the garbage isn’t kept in tightly closed trash cans.
Are there any rules concerning whether smaller opaque bags may be placed inside the clear or translucent bag?
Not sure about congodwarf’s location, but this is exactly what we do. The large town bag (orange, non-translucent, by the way) goes into the big rolling trash can, and we tie up- the opaque, white trash bags from the kitchen trash, and the various kinds of bags from the other trash cans around the house, and put them into the rolling trash can until it’s full (it takes many full kitchen trash bags to fill) and then we roll it to the curb. In our town, the town bag doesn’t even have to close around the trash in it, it just has to contain it all.
We don’t even have public trash pickup, everyone in our area has to either pay for a private company to haul away their trash, take it to the dump themselves, pile it in the backyard (or wherever) or sneak it into the neighbors trash cans/dumpsters.
I do compost our kitchen waste for my garden, but that’s not a community recycling program and it’s not curbside. I also take scrap metal/cans down to a recycler for money, but again, that’s not community nor curbside.
We have to contract for our own trash pick-up, and none of these companies does recycling. The closest town has a recycling center, where we usually take some stuff…paper, tin cans, glass and plastic bottles…BUT they only take number 1 & 2 plastics.
From what I understood about what was said at the town meeting, we are not supposed to use smaller opaque bags because the point is that they need to be able to see if we’re throwing out recyclables and they wouldn’t be able to do that with opaque bags. I didn’t question it because I didn’t care enough at the time.
What it sounded like is that if you’re obviously doing a good job with the recycling, they aren’t going to hassle with inspecting your trash. This is probably why they haven’t bitched about us not swapping over to the clear or translucent bags.
We did, I haul trash to the local Waste Management managed dump, and they used to want things separated, but lately, they have been phasing out the recycling bit by bit, so I just toss everything in the general trash dumpster now.