Modesto may trash blue bag recycling program

By Leslie Albrecht Modesto Bee:

The city's blue bag recycling program could be headed to the big landfill in the sky. The City Council votes tonight on whether to trash the 12-year-old recycling program, which officials say isn't doing much to help the environment.The blue bag program allows residents to put recyclables in blue shopping bags and toss them into their black, 96-gallon garbage container. The blue bags and recyclables are supposed to be separated from other garbage so they don't end up in landfills. But that rarely happens, said Doug Chadwick, a member of a volunteer committee that advises the city on recycling issues.

Chadwick said he was "extremely annoyed" when he toured local garbage handling facilities and saw firsthand what really happens to the blue bags. "They're just tossed on the floor and run over with a bulldozer that pushes everything into a truck that gets taken out to the landfill," Chadwick said.That's one of the reasons the city is considering eliminating the blue bags starting Jan. 1. Other reasons include:Not many recyclables end up in the blue bags, said Solid Waste Manager Jocelyn Reed. Instead, people often turn in their empty glass bottles and aluminum cans for money at redemption centers. The material collected in the blue bags often is not valuable enough to recycle, so it goes to a landfill. There's little market for such items as milk jugs, butter tubs, tin cans and Styrofoam, Reed said. But recycling them costs money. Materials must be sorted, baled, trucked to an end user and made into a product. It costs more to sort, ship and process those materials than they are worth, Reed said.

Encouraging people to use blue bags puts more plastic into the waste stream. Some cities have banned plastic shopping bags. "There is a problem with plastic bags in the environment," Reed said. "They do create a degree of pollution. It's kind of a contradictory message to continue to promote the use of the plastic bags." Cost. The $30,000 state grant that paid for the blue bags was axed from the budget this year. (more)