Queen City Rolls Out Controversy
It’s part of a growing trend that has seen cities turn to recycling programs as reliable cash cows. In San Francisco, for example, residents are required to use three separate bins for refuse – one for recyclables, one for compostables and one for regular trash – with fines that range from $100 to $1,000 for offenders.
That doesn’t appear to be the direction Charlotte is headed with its new RFID technology, at least not for now. Which isn’t to say the new Recycle It! initiative couldn’t end up costing residents extra money in fines, if they aren’t careful about how and when they use those big, new green bins. A minimum $50 fine can be issued if residents place the bins out sooner than the day they’re scheduled for collection, or leave them curbside past midnight on collection days.
The jolly, green rollout recycling bins replace the long familiar and much smaller red ones that have been part of the Queen City’s landscape for nearly two decades. As part of the new system, collectors will no longer have to sort through recyclables curbside, separating papers, plastics and bottles. They’re all hauled off together, along with some newly allowed items like aerosol cans, plastics 1-5 and 7, and milk and juice cartons, to be separated later in the recycling process, hence the “single-stream” moniker attached to the program. A complete list of items that can and cannot be recycled is available here.
The new system also comes with a new collection schedule, with recyclable pickups every other week, instead of weekly, and households lumped into two collection zones. While regular garbage and yard-waste collection remains weekly, most residents will see their collection days changed.
The new recycling program comes fully equipped with a hefty price tag, costing the city about $12 million for 310,000 of the new RFID chip-embedded rollout bins and about $7 million for equipment upgrades to recycling centers to handle the single-stream system.
Officials, however, project the new initiative will save the city about $12 million over five years and upwards of $43 million over the next decade. The savings will materialize, officials said, through reduced costs associated with the scaled-back recycling collection schedules, while the city is also selling off its fleet of older recycling trucks to help pay for the new system.
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