Next month Marion Utilities will open a new recycling drop-off center, which will replace the City of Marion’s blue bag program.
The change is due to a few reasons.
The blue bag program is a “co-mingling” recycling program, where several kinds of recyclable materials are placed into one container – such as plastics, cardboard and glass. Residents place all their recyclables in the blue bags and put them out with the rest of their trash. When the waste is dumped at the transfer station, solid waste employees pull the blue bags out of the regular solid waste stream and take them to Republic Services, where Marion Utilities pays a high premium to have the recyclables processed.
In the past, most of that material ended up being purchased by companies in China, where it was sorted and recycled.
“Being proper stewards of our environment is of utmost importance, and the benefit of having those materials recycled, rather than landfilled, outweighed the higher cost we were paying for processing,” Marion Utilities said in a press release. “However, in the last few years, the recycling market has changed drastically. China has passed new laws and they are no longer buying co-mingled recyclables.”
Often times co-mingled recyclables are contaminated with food and other waste, which makes them difficult – if not impossible – to recycle. Here in the US, tons of co-mingled recyclables that were collected from residents are now being stored in warehouses or landfilled.
Marion Utilities discovered that many people, unfortunately, were using blue bags as trash bags, which makes the process even less effective.
Knowing that much of its ecyclable material collections were contaminated and not being recycled properly, Marion Utilities were faced with a decision of what to do going forward.
“We want to offer a program where residents can be confident that the materials they are saving for recycling are not just going into a landfill,” the press release read. “It also must be cost-effective for ratepayers.”
The Recycling Center will be open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays, located at 1300 N. Washington Street.
Marion Utilities has coordinated with the county’s operation on Garth Waite Road and will be open on the days they are closed, in an effort to give residents more options. Additional hours may be added in the future if there is enough demand. Also, there will be an attendant on duty to see that the items collected are clean and sorted properly.
Marion Utilities is also working with area neighborhood associations and churches to make sure that the elderly and disabled members of the community have the opportunity to participate if they choose to.
Before you recycle, before you check out this important information:
