When I heard a truck go by this morning around 8:15 I looked out to see the garbage gone, and the recycling containers I use had their lids off. I went out to return them to my back yard before someone could run over the lids (which are often left in the road, or blow in the road). I found my recycling container for glass and metal still full. I then thought that the solid waste guys had dumped my newspapers into the regular garbage. I was going to call the Solid Waste Division when I decided to see what had happened to my neighbors’ recycling. Theirs was still waiting to be picked up. A little later I heard another large vehicle coming down Chapin (our street). I looked out to see garbage men dumping my recycling into the backs of regular garbage trucks. Two of these trucks were driving down my street almost side-by-side.
I was curious. I went outside to ask the young man who was hanging on the back of the truck if they were recycling. He said that they were, and that the recycling “trucks” were broken down. Anyone know how many recycling trucks the city has, and how many are regularly used, and how many are kept as “spares”? The young man assured me that these two garbage trucks (one for paper and one for glass and metal) would take the material for recycling. I would recycle whether I got a cut in my trash fee or not, but to make the effort and have city workers undermine me would make me angry. I always wonder how much of our recycling actually enters the recycling stream, and how much the solid waste workers “divert” to regular trash because it is too much effort to keep the streams from commingling.
On that note...Sometimes I see recycling set out to the curb and everything is mixed. ie plastics, paper, cans together. Does anyone know how the city wants us to set our stuff out? Currently, I only do paper since I have just one container. It doesn't seem like they would want to use the manpower to separate all that stuff.
posted by tjintoledo on Mar 26, 2008 at 04:59:35 pm #