South Bend Tribune
A recent story in The Tribune detailed the crisis in recycling that hasn’t hit this area as hard so far — and the trouble that looms ahead from carelessness and a lack of awareness.
The problem plaguing other areas of the country has to do with the contamination that comes from materials that don’t belong in recycling. This contamination is the reason China and some other countries began rejecting bales of recycling materials from this country if it contained excessive amounts of other materials.
The recycling industry had to seek out new markets to process the materials, and prices crashed due to oversupply. In response, some places began dumping recycling in landfills and looking for such solutions as converting materials into energy by burning them.
Things aren’t as bad locally, as most of the recyclables in the South Bend area are sold to Midwestern companies, not China.
But there is cause for concern and it’s summed up by this statistic: Of the 27.9 million pounds of recycling material collected in St. Joseph County by Borden, about 4.4 million pounds were deemed trash that never should have been placed in recycling containers to begin with. The effort to remove those materials is costly.
The problem is that area residents have gotten worse at recycling since the program was initiated over the last two decades. Either they aren’t aware of the clear instructions printed on Borden containers informing them on what is and isn’t accepted for recycling or they aren’t paying attention to them.
Neither is acceptable. Officials should consider an effort to educate consumers to combat and reverse the contamination that has made its way into the recycling streams — the sort of education campaign that took place when recycling first came into this area.
But it’s also up to members of the public to do better, to get informed, to take a minute or two to read the instructions on their recycling bin before carelessly tossing in that battery or greasy pizza box.
