No Recycling Bins No Trash Collection

I received a letter last summer when I was living in East Providence and at the top it read No Recycling Bins / No Trash Collection!  I have to admit I was shocked but yet really excited that they would make such a bold statement.  I was one of the very few houses on my busy multifamily street that actually put out the recycling every single week.  The first week came and went with piles of trash lingering on the sidewalks for days and some till the next trash day.  The town really did it.  They really ignored the people who felt like they could get away with this.  I loved it.  Oddly the piles of trash got me excited because this was a step towards positive change. 

Nov 2^nd was when Cranston joined Providence, East Providence, Lincoln, Cumberland and Smithfield in the No Recycling Bins, No Trash Collection policy.  After the letter went out to Cranston residents 6,000 recycling bins were picked up from the public works department.   As the state landfill fills up hopefully more of the towns will participate in this change.  The more trash we make the higher our taxes will be going up as the price per pound of trash will increase over the next few years. 

The policy notes that only one bin needs to be placed outside along with the trash either blue, green or preferably both.  If not the residents trash will not be picked up and the resident must bring their trash back off the sidewalk or they will receive a citation. 

This new policy will cut cost and protect the environment.  Going green never looked so good for these towns.  Hopefully this will be a positive model for other communities to follow.   

Here are just a few facts about recycling  from  www.dosomething.org

• The average American uses 650 pounds of paper each year – 100 million tons of wood could be saved each year if all that paper was recycled.
• Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures a year! Ever heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It’s twice the size of Texas and is floating somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. It’s also 80 percent plastic, and weighs in at 3.5 million tons.
• More than 20 million Hershey’s Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. Believe it not, ALL that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it so most it goes in the trash!
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours. In spite of this, Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every three months!

Posted by: Kate Kiselka