Our town's big recycling day turned into a total mess last weekend

Honestly, I was at the community center in Springfield helping sort plastics when I saw a guy dump a whole bag of greasy pizza boxes into the paper bin. I had to tell him they're trash now, not recyclable, and he just shrugged and walked off. It felt like all our flyers and talks about contamination were for nothing. Has anyone found a way to get people to actually listen about this stuff?

5 comments

5 Comments

davis.olivia1mo ago

Tbh we just put big, clear signs right on the bins with pictures and it cut down on mistakes a lot.

the_oliver15d ago

Maybe those signs and cheat sheets are just making people feel like they don't have to think for themselves anymore. If someone can't be bothered to learn the basic rules after a few reminders, no amount of pictures on a lid is going to fix that.

quinn60615d ago

Springfield's program actually switched to single-stream last year which means greasy pizza boxes can go in paper now.

max_cooper211mo ago

Ugh, that's so frustrating. I've had that exact same thing happen at our drop-off site. You take the time to explain it to someone and they just don't care, it makes the whole volunteer effort feel pointless sometimes.

emma_garcia1mo ago

Yeah it can feel like that for sure. What finally helped us was making a super simple cheat sheet. We taped it right to the lid with pictures of what goes where, like a plastic bottle in one bin and a pizza box in the other. People actually started reading it and our contamination rate went way down.