Community Corner
Mixed Emotions About Mixed Recycling
Lakewood takes a big step toward single-stream recycling; and I take a small one.
Ecstatic.
That’s how I felt when I learned that we could now combine our papers and cardboard in with our mixed recycle in blue bags or clear see-through bags.
Yes! Single-stream recycling – everything together in one container or bag, in our city– had finally arrived in my adopted hometown. Oh, how other still-separating suburbs would be green with envy.
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I felt the ease of sort-less recycling wash over me. No more Deadman’s Curve on the stair landing to my basement. No more tying newspapers or finding some random box to tuck cardboard packaging. No. More. Sorting.
Then I read the fine print, or not-so-fine as it would turn out.
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I had naively been envisioning the perfect world of single-stream recycling that exists with an automated cart system where residents have a sturdy bin to toss everything in and a truck with a mechanical arm picks it up and tips its contents every week or every other week. The kind of system we adopted not so long ago for our trash.
In our less-than-perfect world here in Lakewood, however, there is a 30-pound weight limit when combining paper with mixed recycle because human arms, not mechanical ones, lift the bags into collection trucks. This limitation hurts an avid newspaper and magazine reader like me who will still be asked to separately package large amounts of these and other heavy materials such as books and telephone books.
But I understand the importance of such a weight limit when it involves the safety of the six – yes, just six – city recycling workers who collect the blue bags for our city of more than 50,000 people. What a load they must carry.
According to the city, blue bags can now hold general household paper including flattened cereal boxes, junk mail, some newspapers, the occasional magazine or paperback book, empty cardboard rolls from toilet paper or paper towels. I am still excited about this. I love shooting the TP rolls down to my steps to score a play. My average is respectable unless my bin is nearly full and the bounce sends the rolls straight down to the basement. (Again, I ignore this trajectory. I’ll deal with it later.)
Being able to throw my scrap paper and junk mail in the blue bag is wonderful, I must say. I heart this new convenience and it keeps me from being lazy and throwing it in the trash.
I recently talked with Carol Rothgery, the head of the city’s refuse and recycling division, and was surprised to find out that the city had been doing single-stream collection well before residents were given the OK in March. The city had been throwing blue bags and paper and cardboard recycling together in the same truck since June 2009.
A little history: For close to 20 years, Lakewood has sent its garbage to Cleveland because it offers close proximity and good tipping fees. Recycling was a different story. The city sent its mixed recycling – plastics, glass and aluminum – to Royal Oak Recycling in Cleveland, and sent its paper and cardboard recycling to Caraustar, a paper recycler with a facility in Cleveland.
But when the economy tanked and the city started incurring unsustainable fees for recycling, it started exploring an additional recycling relationship with Cleveland, which sends its single-stream collection to Greenstar Recycling in Pittsburgh. Also around this time, Lakewood had to cut its refuse workforce from 46 employees to 35 full-time employees, and mandatory recycling was about to go into effect.
So Lakewood began to piggyback on Cleveland’s agreement with Greenstar in 2009 but it wasn’t until this spring that it received assurances that the arrangement would be for the long term, Rothgery said.
This necessary agreement is what brought us single-stream recycling and allowed the city to collect its curbside recycling with less manpower. It also did away with high recycling fees and instead results in a credit to our trash dumping in Cleveland. That’s what I call scoring some serious greens.
“I am excited about this,” Rothgery said. “Anything that’s going to make it easier for the residents to do and more efficient for us to collect is going to increase the recycling... doing the recycle the way that we are doing it now is more economical. We are getting a rebate out of it and we are not paying high fuel costs, which is really huge at this point.”
So remember, no heavy paper items in the blue bags because they will likely break the bag and could hurt a city worker.
“This is what I do,” she said, “I take my junk mail and the paper you accumulate in the house -- toilet tissue rolls, paper towel rolls and some cereal boxes -- I’ll throw those in with the blue bag. But the newspapers and magazines, I tied up and put those separately or I put them in a plastic bag.”
Even though I’m not a single-streamer yet, I’m down a couple streams – junk mail and cardboard packaging. For that, I am happy; not ecstatic, but happy.