Melissa Bailey Photo
Stop throwing your pizza boxes in the recycling bin — and help the city save money in the process.
City officials issued that message Thursday morning at a curbside press conference at 72 Howard Ave.
Public Works chief Doug Arndt warned that New Haveners have been throwing the wrong trash in their big blue recycling bins, contaminating the recycling stream.
“Single stream” doesn’t mean everything, he said. The two biggest offenders: Cardboard that’s contaminated with food waste, such as pizza grease. And plastic bags.
Plastic bags don’t go in the blue bins. You can save them up and recycle them at Stop ‘n’ Shop.
When people put non-recyclables in the blue bin, the city has to pay the recycling facility to dispose of the entire load as trash, according to Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts.
The city is going to start issuing warnings to people with contaminated blue bins. The city won’t pick them up on recycling day. It will pick them up on trash day.
Recycling rates have already shot up by 81 percent, up to 29 percent, since the city switched in 2011 to single-stream recycling, where you no longer have to sort recyclables, according to the city. The city is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result, according to Smuts.
For every ton of recyclables diverted from the trash bin to the recycling bin, the city saves $46, and the city’s solid waste authority saves another $54, totaling $110, he said.
Mayor John DeStefano posed a challenge to the city to boost the recycling rate to 50 percent. That would save $365,000 a year, he estimated.
What can you recycle? Read the details here.