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It’s not just us. Everyone is frustrated with recycling.
Communities around the country have been examining what are the true benefits of recycling and whether it’s worth the public dollars propping up their programs? That is one thing that is true everywhere – it doesn’t pay for itself.
Some have eliminated glass, or created single streams, like Miami-Dade has had for some time. In one town in Arizona, they interrupted their recycling program and just sent everything to the landfill while they figured out what they wanted to do. One town in Washington state also implemented a nearly $3.00 surcharge to continue the program. What? With inflation what it is, interest rates only going up and insurance carriers leaving Florida, who in their right mind would vote for something like that in Miami-Dade? Not me, that’s for sure.
So Miami-Dade has to decide whether it wants to keep burning money in a program that doesn’t work. I was about to write, “or fix it,” but that is not reality.
The truth of the matter is that our recycling generates a contamination rate that is double the national average of 25 percent. How do I know this? Because I read the County’s report. Do I know what that really means? Let me tell you – I had to Google my brains out to educate myself, and I can tell you I am not alone, which is a symptom of the problem. Truth be told, few people really know what is supposed to go into those giant recycling bins.
Here it is in a nutshell. Contamination is easier to get than sunstroke. Simply put, in Miami-Dade, we have single stream recycling, which means everything – plastic, paper and glass goes in one bin. If there is food in any of that stuff, it can either reduce the value of the paper, for example, or make it un-recyclable.
So, co-mingling a yogurt container that still has food in it with your cardboard can muddy up the paper, making it less valuable. And, if you drop a plastic bag full of cans and glass bottles into the recycling bin, the whole trash bin can be considered contaminated and dumped in with the garbage. If you don’t know, plastic bags are NOT recyclable. And you can forget those pizza boxes with grease – those are contaminated and that ain’t going to work, either.
So where does that leave us? At the end of the day, we’ve got a trash problem that is threatening to bury us.
So let’s be big boys and girls and face the truth. Recycling does not work. How about we figure out how much our recycling program actually costs and invest it in a realistic, practical solution. Do we need another landfill? Can we expand the ones we have? Let’s spend the recycling money on learning that and make better decisions. One thing is for sure – recycling is not it!
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