My wife has been recycling things like newspapers, glass, and steel cans by taking them to public bins behind Kroger on Sterling or the old Festival Foods at Northpoint, or sometimes just handing the garbage to a junk removal company. But these places don’t take other recyclable items such as plastic, cardboard, phone books, or magazines. There was also a place downtown called Erlichman’s where you could drop off your phone books and magazines.

Being the good conservationist she is, my wife called Erlichman’s to find out if they or a junk removal Bakersfield service took cardboard and plastic. That’s when she found out that they had been bought out by Midland Davis Recycling, and they do take cardboard, but not plastic. That was the sort-of good news. The bad news is that they closed their Peoria store, leaving only Pekin (south of the jail) as a drop-off location.

Well, that’s a little far to drive to recycle. So, my wife called every other recycling place in Peoria, only to find out no one takes plastic, nor do they take cardboard from residents (although some would take cardboard from businesses).

So, as a last resort, she e-mailed Waste Management (WM), Peoria’s garbage service provider, with a list of questions about their recycling service. She asked what they recycle, and they responded that they recycle “all basic items.” Not helpful; she e-mailed a follow-up question to get a little more detail on what “basic items” meant. It turns out, WM recycles plastic, steel cans, newspaper, magazines, and phone books — even junk mail — but not cardboard. Ironically, the standard footer on their e-mails touted the benefits of recycling cardboard — something they don’t recycle here. When she asked why they don’t recycle cardboard, they said that was a decision made by the local drop-off point for recycling.

The e-mail also said that they pick up once a week. Not true. They pick up every other week.

It gets better: as many of you know, you have to pay extra for recycling in Peoria. Of course, garbage collection is paid for from two sources already: property taxes and the $6/month garbage fee that gets tacked on our water bills. But even with all that revenue, they’ll only dump your stuff in the landfill. If you want your stuff recycled, you have to pay an additional $3.25 per month for which they bill you directly on a quarerly basis.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Peoria was actively trying to discourage people from recycling. Other communities make recycling the priority. For instance, in Morton, recycling is a basic service, but you pay extra for regular garbage pick-up by the canful. You have to buy stickers — kind of like a postage stamp (I like to think of it as mailing your garbage to the landfill).

That kind of system rewards recycling because there’s an incentive to reduce landfill waste. In Peoria, there is an incentive to put all your recyclable items in the landfill. Meanwhile, the solid waste landfill in Edwards is filling up. WM’s contract is up in 2009 — can it be renegotiated to incentivize recycling?