When residents put their recyclables in curbside bins, contamination wasn’t a problem.\n<\/p>\n
Now that carts have replaced the bins, the contamination rate has shot up from 12 percent to 32 percent. Polk officials said they were surprised, though this has been a problem in other Florida counties, so they should not have been.\n<\/p>\n
It seems that some people didn’t get the message and use their recycling cart as a second garbage cart.\n<\/p>\n
The contamination is made up of two different types of materials.\n<\/p>\n
One type involves materials such as glass bottles and single-use plastic water bottles, which were accepted under the previous recycling rules, which changed in 2016.\n<\/p>\n
The other involves materials such as plastic bags and polystyrene containers, which have never been accepted.\n<\/p>\n
These materials reduce the quality of the acceptable recyclables, they can gum up the processing equipment and they require more labor to pull them from the loads.\n<\/p>\n
Polk has taken a financial hit as a result.\n<\/p>\n
The County Commission recently approved a change in its contract with Waste Management to increase the processing fee for recycling loads from $50 to $90 a ton.\n<\/p>\n
This fee increase will continue until the contamination percentage drops significantly. Anything below 20 percent is supposedly acceptable, though the lower the better.\n<\/p>\n
To accomplish this, Polk has hired a marketing firm to come up with a more user-friendly educational campaign to persuade residents to mend their recycling ways.\n<\/p>\n
The campaign is supposed to roll out later this winter.\n<\/p>\n
In the meantime, make sure you’re not part of the problem. Talk to your neighbors if you get a chance and help them to comply.\n<\/p>\n
Recycling is not that difficult as long as the rules are clear.\n<\/p>\n
That has been a problem in the past. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When residents put their recyclables in curbside bins, contamination wasn’t a problem. Now that carts have replaced the bins, the contamination rate has shot up from 12 percent to 32 percent. Polk officials said they were surprised, though this has been a problem in other Florida counties, so they should not have been. It seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gci"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=681"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":682,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681\/revisions\/682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ancientislands.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}