Provo City and BYU have asked that students and residents help their recycling programs by ensuring their donations are recyclable and in the correct donation bin.
Bryce Rolph, Provo City's Sanitation superintendent, said Provo’s recycling has dealt with “high amounts of trash being placed in our public recycling bins.”
“The recycle bins are often used to dump office and household furniture, construction debris and general garbage,” Rolph said. “They are also frequently used by businesses that can fill one or two bins in a single haul. This means that residents will often find them full when they go to use them.”
When residents drop off items for donation, they often make mistakes, Rolph said. These mistakes include putting their recyclables in plastic bags and donating foam packing material and plastic that cannot be recycled.
According to Provo City’s Super Six in the Bin, only plastic containers made of polyethylene terephthalate (plastic 1) or high density polyethylene (plastic 2) are recycled. These include plastic containers such as "soda-pop bottles, cooking-oil bottles, peanut-butter jars ... milk, bleach and detergent bottles (and) margarine tubs," according to Provo's recycling page.
Bremen Leak, the associate director of BYU Sustainability and Continuity, spoke about the problems that come when garbage and other contaminants get mixed in with recyclables.
“With every recycling effort, you have items that will contaminate your recycling,” Leak said. “They will contaminate the overall bulk of your recyclables and will have to be thrown out.”
If recyclable bins are rejected by transfer stations because of excess contamination, the city will have to pay to bring those bins back from the station and take them to a landfill.
Leak recommended two ways to help prevent contaminating donation bins: 1) See if the item can be recycled through Provo City or BYU, and 2) clean any items you wish to donate.
To help reduce the risk of contamination and keep the costs of recycling down, residents should break down boxes to help preserve space in the recycling bins, and not place recyclable materials in bags as “any recyclable material placed in a plastic bag will most likely be thrown out by the recycling center as trash,” Rolph said.
Rolph also asked that residents not place trash in the bins and not place material on the ground next to the bins.
“If the bins are full,” Rolph said, “please be mindful and return on a different day.”
BYU has taken a different approach with its recycling program. Bill Rudy, the manager of BYU’s Recycling Department, said one difference that sets their approach apart from other programs is that they “ask people to do a little bit more.”
BYU recycles the same materials as Provo City: Cardboard, paper, metal cans, and plastic bottles. However, unlike Provo City, BYU requires donors to separate their materials before dropping them off in recycling bins.
“We pick things up separated, and so we ask people to separate. We have paper and cardboard and bottles, and that requires sorting and thought,” Rudy said. “We have to pick out anything that is not those things. So, the better people are at putting things in the right bin, then the less sorting we do, and the faster we can go.”
For Rudy, BYU’s recycling program “ties into our role as stewards.”
“We are supposed to be stewards over God's creations. One of the easiest ways to get started with that, or to be conscious of that, is recycling,” Rudy said. “Because what we're asking you to do, no, what we are providing people with the opportunity to do, is to take something that they're done with and put it back into circulation, instead of sending it to the dump where it just gets buried.”
While disposing of contaminated materials may be common with other recycling programs, BYU claims otherwise.
“We don’t throw stuff away. We don't do that here because we feel an obligation,” Rudy said. “We have a stewardship responsibility to care for it and get it through to where they intended it to go.”