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?

3 comments

3 Comments

davis.olivia12d ago

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

max_cooper2112d 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_garcia12d 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.