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?
With the price of commodities of all types soaring, people are making a ‘killing’ by recycling. The Journal Star did a profile of one of Peoria’s scavengers a few years back. The guy made a respectable living going around and scavenging (eg recycling) people’s stuff (metal, plastic et al). He bought a house had a car… not exactly the image people conjure of bums rummaging through the trash.
I got some family members that have taken up collecting metal, breaking it down, to supplement their decent paying day jobs. There is some serious money laying around out there.
It boggles the mind that we are subsidizing recycling. If anything, they should be paying us.
The Peoria City/County Landfill gets a cut of the tipping fees (money paid to deposit waste in the landfill) therefore local govt. officials have no real incentive to recycle. Saving money on future landfill development costs is too abstract compared with thousands of dollars in cash from Waste Management every year. Sad. Local enviros need to demand a better city contract which includes free recycling. This should be a political issue for the city council candidates, and also for the Peoria County Board candidates.
In Washington, Grimm Brothers does our garbage and recycling now. Each household can have one bin free of charge. Each bin thereafter is $11.
They pick up newspaper, glass and plastic. I wonder about the types of plastic and glass they really accept, but they do take everything we have put out, including magazines, cardboard and phone books.
We have a lot of green glass, and when the city first switched to Grimm, they would not take it, but when my husband told them that the previous carrier had accepted the green glass, they accepted it, and have ever since. I wonder if they actually recycle it, but I don’t see why not. When I lived in Peoria, I would take my recyclables to Northpoint, and they had bins for green glass.
As far as the plastic, I wonder if they are able to recycle plastic number 5, or only number 2, but they do take what we put out.
Midland-Davis bought Erlichman’s about three years ago. It’s cheaper to do business in Tazewell County but the peoria closure may be temporary, as I haven’t noticed a realtor’s sign on the property.
I love my scavenger. We always try to put out scavengable stuff the night before so we don’t miss him (he comes through early).
When I lived in NC, it was actively illegal NOT to recycle corrugated cardboard because there was apparently a nationwide shortage of it and it was hitting NC’s furniture industry really hard. There were big stickers on all the dumpsters (and most every dumpster had a big green “cardboard only” buddy right next to it) And yes, I did know a couple people who got ticketed for it!
Having done rather a lot of reading on landfills in the past few years (being a part of Peoria Families Against Toxic Waste/the whole PDC landfill fight) somewhere along the way I saw a study about what kind of money is involved in recycling. I will try to find the source shortly, but just trust me for now…
It is documented financial fact that waste management companies that offer a recycling service make quite a bit of money on it. 1. They pay less in tipping fees at the solid waste landfill, since the weight of the garbage decreases significantly when folks are making a decent effort to sort their recyclables. 2. They make money on selling the plastic/glass/paper/cardboard commodities.
This was essentially the gist of it, because I remember thinking, why in the name of all that is holy is Peoria charging people to recycle when it, from both angles, if they didn’t charge for it, they’d still make a lot of money on it?
I lived in tallahassee, fl for six years (starting 8.5 years ago)and even that city offered free recycling. To translate a bit, that’s like saying I lived in Outer nowhere with toothless rednecks and even they realized recycling is a smart deal!
I suggest to cgiselle that she visit the City/County landfill and see exactly what they do, how much space they have, what they accept or don’t accept and get her name on the appointment list so she can sit on the meetings and listen, learnb and give input.
She didn’t visit PDC’s Landfill to see what they did but became an expert on it anyway. Now is her chance to become an expert on the C/C Landfill.
Our household recycles everything but plastic bottles and we will do that as soon as an operation opens in Peoria. WM recycles, I suggest she call them for details.
All can call Karen Raithel, Director of Reclying Resources at 672-6932. The City and County have three representives on the Landfill Committe that meets monthly at City Hall. Visitors and comments are always welcome.
The city could always raise the garbage fee by $3.25/month
C.J., I did not know they didn’t take cardboard. We have been leaving our cardboard in the bins and they pick it up every other week.
We recycle using the WM curbside service. They take cardboard, all glass, aluminum, milk, soda, and detergent plastics, and tin cans. I don’t like paying for it and I don’t think it’s particularly efficient for them to charge down streets, using gas and spewing fumes, to pick up commodities from every ninth or tenth house. But, living in Peoria, what is a person to do?
I’ve always thought it was interesting that you have to pay for wm to pick up your recyclables when they get money the money for recycling.
Have you seen the Dirty Jobs episode where he collects garbage and then they sort it out? Very interesting. Too bad more cities aren’t doing that.
I think recycling should be free (encouraged behavior) and prisoners should be made to sort it into different catagories. The states and cities would make money and the area might be cleaner.
I can’t believe the amount of garbage we’ve reduced by recycling. We easily fill up our little box from WM weekly. by the second week, it’s overflowing. If the City did what they should of done, (roll the garbage fee into my tax bill- now it’s deductible at tax time) and charge me enough to cover both garbage and recycling, and pick up weekly.
CJ,
If you or any of your readers are looking for a place to take old computers, monitors, printers and any other computer equipment, take them to International Depot Services, Inc. They are located at 204 Morton Street Peoria 61603.
They do not charge for any amoun of hardware that you bring in and will even pick up a load for free if you have a large quantity.
Computers and related equipment have plastic, metal,lead, copper and a lot of other things that the land fill does not want. Most companies charge you to recycle these items but they still do it for free.
How do other places do things…?
In Germany and much of Europe, there is a legal practice that manufacturers and distributors of goods are responsible for their recycling, not consumers per se. You cannot bring a product to market without a plan or means to recycle it. For example, if you make or sell paint, you have to also be able to recycle unused paint and provide a means for the consumer to recycle it. This means that anyone who sells paint, also has to take back unused paint for recycling. If you sell batteries, you also have to provide means for their recycling, like a recycling bin to take the old ones. So places like Best Buy or any grocery store would have a bin near the entrance for various batteries. Bottles operate under a deposit system like we had in the U.S. back in the 60s n 70s. Some plastic bottles are reused via the deposit system, but generally their use is highly discouraged. Any durable goods, have to be receivable by those who sell them and are then shipped to a recycler to break them down. It is all MANDATORY.
For the consumer, it is mandatory to sort your trash and dispose of various items properly or be fined stiffly. So every house would have like 4 different colored trash cans (wheeled ones like WM rents out but smaller) You would have your ‘blue’ trash which is paper and yard waste that is picked up every other week. You have your ‘yellow’ trash which is plastic, metals, and laminated stuff (ex. paper milk cartons), that alternates with the blue. Then there is the ‘brown’ which is all the bio degradable stuff (melon rinds, coffee filters etc) which is picked up biweekly. ‘Brown’ really is a small amount once all the other taken care of. Glass is sorted by white and colored and deposited at fixed points around town, in special dumpsters. Clothes and other textiles are deposited at special locations too. Some of the clothes find their way to humanitarian efforts while the less desirable stuff gets recycled or burned. Big stuff like old furniture was only picked up once a year. You could find your butt in jail for dumping old furniture someplace. All the other stuff generally had to be retaken by retailers who in turn sent them back to the manufacturers or their designated recycling agents.
The garbage collectors could issue you tickets if the stuff was not properly sorted.
There was a power plant in town that would burn waste that was readily and ‘safely’ burnable that otherwise would head to a landfill.
As an observation, excess packaging is highly discouraged over there. Things like ‘lunchables’ will never make it to market. All packaging has to be cleared by regulatory authorities. Ease of recycling is a criteria. So everything you find in the grocery store or anywhere else has very minimal packaging. No bags within bags within bags. Music CDs don’t have that annoying plastic wrapped around them (which does result in higher shop lifting. You always have to check inside to be sure the right CD is inside). Butcher sections in grocery stores are alive n well, to paper wrap your purchase. You actually have to wait in line and tell the butcher what you want. The use of foam and plastic wrap for meats is not widely used. Minimal packaging means less waste.
The Midwest Fiber Recycling depot in Mossville has bins for unmixed recyclable containers (glass, metal and 1&2 plastics) and unmixed office paper (newspapers, office paper and lightweight pressboard cereal-type boxes but not magazines or catalogs). You can also drop off corrugated cardboard at the main building. The facility is located in Mossville in the industrial park off Old Galena Road near where 6 dumps off onto Route 29. It’s about 10 minutes north of the dropoff behind festival foods. The recycling bins, sponsored by Peoria County, are behind a locked gate that is only open from 700-330 Monday-Friday. There is no access to the bins after hours.
I’m from Peoria and currently live in New Zealand. Here (at least in my town) there is a clear consumption tax on garbage: you can only put trash out in special “City Council” bags that you buy from the grocer with extra tax applied. Recycling is unlimited with no fee.
While the merits of recycling are unclear to me (having seen some very intriguing analysis of both the recycling industry and energy flow of the process), I can tell you that the Christchurch NZ policy has a real behavioral impact and the amount of curbside trash is much less than that of Peoria. My wife and I estimate we’re setting out about only 1/4 of the trash volume that we were in Peoria. The recycling bin is heaping every week.