DALLAS, TX - Glen Washington stuffed his blue recycling cart to the brim with a red wagon, a ripped lawn chair, a metal tire rim and a soiled oil drum lid. That is, until Dallas' sanitation services told him he had a bucket full of trash. But the 50-year-old Highland Meadows resident said he's at least trying. At a time when climate change and carbon emissions draw national concern, Dallas residents are inching toward green status. They've started with recycling. And, it turns out, they're good at it, well, most of the time.
The amount of recycled material has doubled since the city began its curbside blue cart program a year and a half ago. Its contamination rate – the percentage of material that is not recyclable but put in bins anyway – is half of Fort Worth's. And with three times more Honey Nut Cheerios boxes, Coors cans, spaghetti jars and other recyclables collected than Houston, Dallas makes the larger city look like a trash dump. "Dallas is doing its best to be a greener city," said John Barlow IV, the city's recycling operations manager.
He attributes the success of the program to a yearlong education effort. "And this is just one step in the process," he said. When the blue cart program launched for single-family residents last January, Mr. Barlow said the department estimated it would get 65,000 calls for bins. Instead, it received requests for 90,000 of the 96-gallon, sea-blue wheeled carts. The idea for the program actually came from residents, he said. "People were demanding it," said Mr. Barlow, who estimates a 50 percent participation rate.
Still, while Dallas may rival Texas cities such as Houston and San Antonio in recycling, it does not compare to places such as San Diego, which has the same size population. The California city had a recycling rate of 55 percent last year, according to a survey released in March by Waste News, a trade publication for the sanitation industry. This percentage indicates how much of its refuse a city recycles. Houston recycles 2 percent; Austin, 28 percent; Dallas, 12 percent. But Dallas is trying, evolving from a blue bag program implemented in 2000 that required buying a special bag and then separating plastics, metals and papers.
Residents now call the city for a cart. A white truck with the words "Too Good to Throw Away" scrawled on its side picks up the recycled goods every other week. In a few locations, this now occurs once a week. The items are then transported to a recycling facility in Garland, compressed and resold. The city gets 67 percent of the proceeds. Within a year, the amount collected by the city has grown from 10,000 to 20,000 tons. Including contracted services, recycling now reaches about 60,000 tons.
The question is whether this transitioning mentality is happening fast enough – and if it's really that inclusive. "It's taken 20 years, but I'm delighted they have gone this far," said Joanne Hill, 76, a recycling pioneer who opened the city's first recycling center more than 20 years ago. Dallas still has no commercial recycling program, she said, despite the city's vast business sector.
"And think of all those people in apartments that are springing up like weeds. Multifamily homes are not being served," she said. The city plans to address this by scattering an additional 38 drop-off containers in parking lots near shopping centers across Dallas in the next six to eight months. More than 80 exist now, but this means a trip much farther than the front door.
That's what separates successful recycling efforts from those that are not, said Ed Skernolis, the National Recycling Coalition's director of policy and programs. "Convenience is a big issue," he said. "The easier you make it for people the more likely they are to participate." It also
Source: DallasNews.com