(This column was originally published April 2 in the April print edition of the Hendersonian.)
Last June, the city of Henderson announced that it was semi-automating trash collection by fitting garbage trucks with a mechanical tipper arm to lift and empty trash cans. And not just any trash cans — city-issued trash cans that would work with the tipper arms.
Each household would be issued a single 96-gallon rolling, lidded trash bin. And just about every household responded to the effect of, “Are you kidding me? How do you expect us to fit all our garbage in a single garbage can?”
I thought this was a big overreaction. I was confident that most households could fit a week’s trash into a single 96-galloner.
Of course, I was wrong.
As the weekly trash day approaches, I see city trash bins overflowing with refuse. The lids can’t close, and what won’t fit is piled on the curb despite the city’s warning last year that, “Trash not placed in the bins will not be collected.”
Yet my own two-person household seldom disposes of more than a single 33-gallon garbage bag per week.
How could this be? We prepare most of our meals at home, which generates trash. And we have our share of Amazon boxes arriving at our doorstep. Why isn’t our rolling trash bin stuffed beyond capacity?
Because we recycle (and compost) with a vengeance.
“The average person throws away 4½ pounds of solid waste in the trash” each day, County Solid Waste Coordinator Eric Higgs said. “Eighty percent of it can be recycled.”
Recycling became a part of our lifestyle years ago, and it isn’t the least bit hard. We try to be thoughtful about it. For example:
Glass: Glass bottles are essentially a pollutant in mixed recycling because they break, and the glass shards pretty much ruin the whole load. That’s why the city tells folks not to put glass in the city-issued blue recycling bins.
Instead, our glass bottles go into a sturdy box on our back porch to await hauling to the recycling center, where the county crushes bottles to be mixed in with gravel aggregate when new culverts are installed on county roads. “It saves taxpayers money by not having to buy so much rock,” Higgs said.
Corrugated boxes and cardboard: These materials are imminently recyclable. Henderson has not one, but two industries — International Paper and Pratt Paper — that that dissolve used corrugated boxes into a slurry from which they make new rolls of heavy brown paper used to make new shipping boxes.
We break down and, if necessary, cut up corrugated boxes and cardboard and stuff it into a big corrugated box that we can take to the county recycling center, which sells bales of cardboard — 400 tons just last year — to Pratt.
Plastic film: It’s quite astonishing how much flexible plastic wrapping material flows through our lives. Most stores use flexible plastic shopping bags. Paper towels and toilet paper comes wrapped in plastic. So do bread, newspapers, produce from the grocery, clothes from the dry cleaner and a zillion other things.
What’s nice is, it can be recycled into products such as Trex composite (plastic) decking.
We stuff plastic film into a big plastic bag. When it’s full (it doesn’t take long), we take it with us to Walmart, which has boxes by its entrances for dropping off flexible plastic.
Bottle caps: There’s a company in Evansville that can recycle plastic bottle caps into a variety of products, including benches. The county recycling center takes them.
Aluminum cans: They’re spectacularly recyclable. We crush ours and drop them off in a caged trailer at the Habitat for Humanity center at the foot of the Second Street overpass.
Office paper/used envelopes and newsprint: The recycling center has special bins for paper and newsprint.
Plastic jugs and metal cans: Ours go into our city recycling bin, although we could just as easily take No. 1 and 2 jugs and metal to the county recycling center.
Coffee grounds, egg shells, fruit and vegetable peelings: We compost them to make next year’s potting soil.
Dead batteries, magazines, books, appliances, used motor oil: The county recycling center takes ’em.
Tires: The county recycling center will accept waste tires from households June 6 and 7 and the morning of June 8.
It’s free to drop off recyclables (into the proper bins, of course) at the county recycling center at 398 Sam Ball Way. It’s open weekdays from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and it just started experimenting with being open on the morning of the second Saturday of each month.
There are some rules. Check them out at www.hendersonky.us/215/Recycling-Solid-Waste
With a little effort, you should find that your city trash bin will work just fine, thank you very much.