This Wednesday is a “Red Wednesday”, which means trash and recycling pickup. Please go over what can be recycled. Ideally, rolling recycling containers are stored and deployed in the back alleys along with trash cans. Please make sure you pick up containers after pickup tomorrow night.
If you have not done so already, don’t forget to sign up for your Recycling Perks.
In order to take your recycling to the next level, read this: 10 ways to improve your recycling.
In recycling news, a Roanoke-area recycling center is developing a plan for its big pile of glass.
Article excerpt:
But glass, which historically has a low recycling rate in the United States, creates a bottleneck at RDS. Unable to find a buyer, and unwilling to haul it to the landfill, Benedetto let it accumulate at the Roanoke facility. The pile of cullet, or crushed glass, is estimated to weigh more than 1,800 tons.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality cited RDS earlier this year for exceeding a storage limit of 150 tons for recyclable waste.
In an agreement with DEQ, Benedetto accelerated his plans to grind the crushed glass into a finer, sand-like material and remove contaminants such as small pieces of bottle caps, paper and plastic waste.
The process, which involved spending close to $100,000 on a trammel and other equipment, will make the glass more marketable as fill material for roads and other construction projects and as an ingredient in the making of concrete and asphalt.
(quick editorial: Why not use this piece as a starting point for examining the role recycling in the current climate crisis? Reduce and Reuse are prior to Recycle, and the life-cycle of these processes has an enormous carbon footprint. Not all green solutions are equal, and some aren’t even green, much less solutions.)