Recycling in the City

My husband Michael was just about to yell obscenities out the window.

Why would he sully this beautiful morning? He heard a car stopped in our alley way with its driver dumping what sounded like loads of trash into our building’s dumpster. But just as he opened the window, ready to spew some trash of the verbal kind, he saw that the driver was actually dropping off tons of bottles and cans into our recycling bins.

Well, now, that’s different.

Why, you ask? Because we both recalled our own attempts to recycle at our last residence in the city (just a few blocks away), which consisted of several calls to various departments (completely separate from where you would think to call – waste management), finally obtaining a recycling container, only to watch our cans rust before anyone would come and pick them up.

It’s just not that easy to recycle here.

Which makes our city pretty different from San Francisco, where recycling is not only encouraged, it just might become mandatory.

A May 7th article in the New York Times reported that the city by the bay has been successfully keeping 70% of its trash out of local landfills. Its Mayor, Gavin Newsom, thinks that isn’t enough:

So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended.

San Francisco has found a way to recycle their scrap paper in a way that makes money (scrap paper = packing materials) and turn their food scraps into baggable compost for California farmers.

The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs, devoted to different materials, including regular garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint.

Wow. And one of neighbors needed to drive around the city just to find a place to stick her aluminum cans.

How easy is it to recycle in your town?