Talking trash at the Library tonight
As many of our readers know, we have somewhat of a recycling crisis here in Framingham. It's so far costing us 161,000 dollars and could grow if we don't clean up our recycled materials. The Chinese are rejecting more of our recycled materials, cardboard and paper for contamination reasons. Tonight at the Costin room, our recycle guru Stephen Sarnosky from the DPW, Sanitation division will tell us what can and cannot be put into the recycle bins. Starts at 7PM. This is another League of Women Voters informed Framingham event.
posted by Jim Pillsbury @ 2:45 PM
18 Comments
18 Comments:
The show we did can be seen here:
https://videoplayer.telvue.com/player/994DtmGEsi0VDYK3jJI2BJ72GfgNIpU2/media/395361?autostart=false&showtabssearch=true&fullscreen=false
Great job. Very informative. Thanks for doing this
This is full of information I did not know. Wish I had known about this so I could have been there to ask questions, but thanks for doing
Ask away, if I don't know the answer I know people who do.
my question is why were residents never notified of the changes in recycling policy but we are not going to be expected to pay for not following those changes
In line with the previous posters commnent can't they just come up with a list of what we can recycle and what we can't recycle? This guy keeps saying reasonably clean. I must say what I consider reasonably clean would not past muster with my wife. So is it my sense of reasonably clean or is it her sense of reasonably clean?
This was an hour well spent. Kudos to the LWV and Jim for putting this together and for making the video available to those who could not attend.
is there some place on the city website that you can go to and check whether you can recycle something or not? and are these rules only valid in framingham or is this state wide?
I believe the contaminated recycle issue has crept up on our DPW. Back in the day, the importers took everything we had. It's like everything else in our lives, we think we're doing the right thing only to find we are not. Recycling awareness and education is the key. Getting the kids involved is the other.
I understand the grey area of cleanliness but as long as you make a good faith effort I think the material will not contaminate the cardboard. And if in doubt.. throw it out in the trash barrel.
A few take a ways:
No plastic bags of any kind...no matter how thick they are.
no milk cartons
plastic bottles rinsed and capped are ok
no pizza boxes no matter how clean they are
no Styrofoam at all
no bagging the recycles, leave everything loose in the barrel
no plastic coated food boxes
no need to remove any labels on anything
here's the url from the City web site. It's not as fancy as the flyer we had last night but it's worth printing the page out.
https://www.framinghamma.gov/461/Acceptable-Items
The rules apply to all municipalities that recycle throughout the State.
What did we all do before YouTube and FaceBook Live? You can google anything and find out how to do it nowadays. Thanks for putting this together. Can you get the city to post this on their website so those who are not aware of your Facebook page can benefit from it. Seems like a no brainer to me to do that but then I have been accused of not having a brain before.
We tapped the same show and AFTV will hopefully run it for a while.i will ask Gov TV to do the same.
Good idea. The city should have been the ones to host this event but glad the LWV picked up where they are slacking off
Just watched the show and learned a lot. Will watch the LWV Facebook thing next. We would never know this stuff if you had not done a Wicked Green show and the LWV had not done an event. It makes me wonder why our city leaves this to private citizens to do the information. SHould't the city have done more about this themselves?
Perhaps they (The City) was caught off guard or just waiting to see what would happen.
No excuses though... but how does the city inform the 70K plus residents and 14K property owners? A mailer was sent out earlier this year with your water bill or tax statement with the recycle flier in it. Did everyone read it?.. It appears not.
I did the same show back in 2016 with Stephen on Wicked Green, but it dosen't cover every household. IMO the DPW needs to get into each school and train the kids on the particulars. And also more recycle bin audits... which cost money. Perhaps a group of volunteers would help in this effort.
I have always wondered about the tradeoff between cleaning and recycling versus throwing in trash. If I have an old jar of sauce is it better to use gallons of water trying to clean it, or just toss it in the trash? Which is the better deal environmentally, not wasting the water or not having the glass jar in a landfill?
6 of one half a dozen of the other. On one hand, using water to clean recycled materials seems to be wasteful but that glass will be used again versus that jar will be in the land fill for hundreds of years. Land fills are closing everywhere and at some point, there will be just a few which would almost mandate us to recycle more and use more water to do it. I guess if I had well water, I'd throw that out and not use my well water. Since we are attached to the MWRA for our water it's easy to use it, until the bill comes. I'm not worrying about the water use yet and feel it's important to keep the flow of recyclable materials out of land fills or incinerators.
Whole Foods, when you go in the left side entrance, you can drop off anything with a deposit on it, at the front desk, glass milk bottles, soft drink bottles and glass bottles with deposits that are purchased there. They do have 3 recycle bins as you walk into the left side entrance that take plastic bags, organics, and cardboard/paper. I need to find out who their recycler is, as they don't seem to stop contaminated cardboard like the food containers or pizza boxes thrown in.
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