Asbury Park, are you recycling?
Mixing recyclables with regular garbage could be costing the city money
A majority of the city’s residents may not be recycling, according to Councilman John Moor.
The city collects recycling on a once-weekly basis, and when Moor puts his cans out he notices few of the homes within the area are doing the same.
“To me, 80 percent of the town is not recycling,” he said.
If recyclable materials are being tossed in with regular garbage, taxpayers could be losing money in the long run since the added weight ups the amount the city pays to have it hauled away.
The city pays about $76 a ton to have regular household garbage removed, according to City Manager John “Jack” Kelly. If recyclables are mixed in with the regular garbage, the added weight ups the tonnage, therefore upping the cost to haul it away.
Depending on global market conditions, the city sometimes is paid from the certain types of household materials that are recycled, he said.
Seemingly, lowering the amount of household trash and increasing recyclables is a win-win situation, and single stream recycling makes it that much easier, according to Moor.
Moor said Asbury Park was one of the first municipalities in Monmouth County to switch over to single stream recycling. Prior to that individual households had to separate recyclables for pickup.
“And it’s so easy,” Moor said, referring to single stream collection. “I throw everything in the recycling bin — cans, newspapers, mail, plastic — I mean, you name it.”
While Kelly did not have the actual zone map handy, he did take a ride in the area of the city scheduled for pickup Thursday morning to see for himself how many homes put bins out to the curb.
“When you drive down the street, you notice there aren’t a lot of recycling cans out there,” he said. “It’s a subject that we definitely need to study. Maybe we pick up too often, maybe we need to market the recycling program better, maybe most of the homes [that did not put out recycling cans] are summer homes. It could be a whole host of reasons.”
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