I feel as though we have been making great progress in our recycling efforts. Although I have no hard numbers to share, it appears, anecdotally, that I’m seeing much less glass and fewer returnables in the blue recycling bins.

I’ve also fielded many questions about how to deal with some difficult items and sent out many copies of the document that has links to all of our guides to recycling. These are mostly in the form of charts designed to be hung on the refrigerator or kitchen wall. When you have an item you’re unsure about, you simply check on the chart to see where best to dispose of it. Send me an email, if you’ve not seen these, and I will send back the page of links.

Thanks to all for those efforts!

There is one new trend that needs our attention. That is the practice of putting bags full of items into the recycle bins. There are two issues with that practice.

If the bag is plastic, it cannot itself be recycled in our bins. Any plastic bag at the side of the curb, whether sitting in a bin or not, is considered to be trash by Casella’s people. If the recycling is in a plastic bag, all of our efforts to save, clean, and separately collect that material is wasted when it then becomes trash on pick-up.

Paper bags, such as large grocery bags are themselves very much recyclable, but when we put them in the bin filled with other stuff, somebody – some real, live person – has to empty the bag in order for the sorting equipment to deal with it.

That all makes it much better to put our recyclables into the bin loosely. We collect stuff in paper bags at my house, but simply dump the bags into the bin before I put the bin by the curb. Since we clean everything before we recycle it, the bin never gets gross and dirty, and material is ready for the sorting machines. When collecting paper, I put the bags into a can in our home offices, and then re-use the bag many times before it has to be folded down and recycled itself, as well.

The advantage of putting things in a bag within the bin, of course, is that it can help keep stuff from blowing around on a windy pickup morning. To solve that problem, I just put a small piece of chipboard on top of the bin and hold it down with a brick when I put the bin out. That also serves to keep things dry if it’s raining on the day of the pickup, so we avoid being charged by the ton to collect water, which weighs 8.33 pounds per gallon, and can add up to a ton very quickly!

Harry Hopcraft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee.