To Recycle Or Not To Recycle?
How many times have you made the trip outside with trash in hand and wondered, “Is this item recyclable? Or should I just through it in the garbage can?” If you are anything like the average American, then the answer is most likely . . . all too often.
Let’s face it. Recycling seems easy at face value. But it really isn’t. In fact, it is worse than that. Deciding what to recycle is kind of hard if you want to do it right. The rules are always changing. What was right last year might not still be right this year.
Never leave the caps on your plastic beverage bottle recently changes to always leave it on because it helps the bottle maintain its shape for the waste hauler’s automated sorting machinery.
In Elgin, IL, the city website clearly stated that plastics marked with the recycling symbol and the numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7 were acceptable just a few years ago; however, this changed to 1, 2, 4 and 5 sometime in the last few years.
The list of confusing things associated with recycling is long and growing every day. The sad fact is that many waste haulers are not recycling what we’re putting in our recycling bins and simply dumping it in landfills. Some estimates are that less than 10 percent of recyclables are actually getting recycled.
In Season Three, The Elgin Watchman’s second podcast drop of every month is focusing on Waste/Recycling in Elgin, Illinois and the surrounding communities. We encourage you to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can check us out HERE to see which podcast platforms carry us.
It is fairly common for Tia and Erik to inject commentary into many of podcast episodes. However, the issue of what can be recycled is serious, and we didn’t want it getting lost in everything our hosts bring to those episodes.
So, we start this blog in the spirit of PUBLIC EDUCATION — what can or cannot be recycled?
Tia, Erik, and other friends of the program have been saving their “trickier” recyclables, taking pictures of those items, and using the City of Elgin’s ElginMobile app (which replaced the Elgin 311 app a few years ago) to ask city hall . . .
Is this item recyclable?
We will start posting those items and the city’s responses here to The Elgin Watchman blog.
Those posts won’t contain any commentary. It will simply include a picture of the item in question and the city’s response.
It is our sincere hope that this public education initiative throughout the course of Season Three will help all of us get a better handle on the recycling each of us faces every day. We also hope our efforts will help demonstrate to city staff as they negotiate a new waste hauler contract this year, that public education and better communication needs to be an important part of the next contract.
If you are interested in participating in this experiment, please join us by:
Download the city of Elgin’s mobile app here for Android and here for Apple
Take a picture of a recycling item you aren’t sure is recyclable
Open the app
Click the + sign at the bottle of your screen
Click the General Inquiry section
Verify your address, type your question, upload your picture
Click the submit button
When the city responds to you with their answer, simply forward it to us and attach a copy of the picture you sent them. We will upload it right here to our blog for everyone to become a little smarter about recycling. Our email address is info@elginwatchman.com.
Let’s get smarter together!