Found out my town's 'green' recycling program is mostly a lie

I was at the county waste facility last month dropping off some old concrete forms and got talking to a guy who works the sorting line. He told me point blank, 'We send over half of the blue bin stuff straight to the landfill because it's contaminated or the wrong plastic.' I looked it up later in the annual report online, and the number was 55 percent. That means more than half of what we all carefully rinse and sort just gets trashed anyway. It feels like a real ethical mess because the town keeps pushing the program hard, sending out flyers about being good citizens. Now I don't know if I should keep trying or just stop, since my effort seems wasted. Has anyone else found out something like this about their local services?

4 comments

4 Comments

stone.brooke2mo ago

Hate finding out stuff like that, makes you feel like a sucker for trying. My city got caught shipping plastic overseas instead of actually recycling it. You start to wonder if the whole system is just for show, right?

anna5782mo ago

Same thing happened with our compost pickup, it just goes in with regular trash now.

miles_hall2mo ago

My town in Oregon stopped the yard waste pickup last year to save money. It feels like every "green" program gets cut first when budgets get tight. They make a big deal about starting these services, then quietly drop them a few years later. Makes you wonder if any of it was really about the environment at all.

kimr741mo ago

My neighbor @miles_hall brought up yard waste cuts in Oregon, and that's a good example but actually even the programs that still run have problems. I work in a neighboring county and I saw the same thing you did with those blue bin numbers. My county's report showed 48 percent to landfill last year, but here's the thing people get wrong - they think contamination means dirty yogurt cups or something. Really it's things like plastic bags, garden hoses, and those black takeout containers that ruin whole batches. So your effort isn't totally wasted, but the system is definitely broken if they don't tell people what can't go in. I still rinse and sort but I stopped putting anything that feels questionable in there.

-1