Monday, May 26, 2014

Recycle It, Right on PTown Streets!

Now we can easily recycle coffee cups and lids
as we're walking down the streets in Provincetown.
I found a stack of these flyers on the information table in the Town Hall lobby. We've been able to recycle bottles, cans and paper in these green recycling containers for a few years now. You'll find them on street corners and in many spots in Provincetown's downtown area. But now you can (and should) put your empty coffee cups and lids in these green bins, too!
It's easier than ever to recycle more and more of our trash these days. Provincetown now uses the "single stream" model of recycling our solid waste, like glass, plastic, paper, aluminum cans and other trash left behind after we've shared a bottle of wine, read the paper or polished off a soft drink.
In single stream recycling, it is no longer necessary to separate plastics, for example, into different varieties to recycle them. We no longer have to keep plastic #1 soda bottles separate from plastic #2 water jugs. Heck, we don't even have to separate the glass, cans and plastics into different loads to be hauled off to be recycled. We can toss it all together, into our blue recycling bins at home, or into these green receptacles on our streets, with just one exception: corrugated cardboard. It has to remain segregated from all the other materials, but everything else can be mixed together. Put loose papers into a paper bag or cereal box to recycle in your blue bin at home, along with clean glass bottles, aluminum or steel cans, and, finally, any kind of plastic. And when you finish reading the paper on a bench in front of Town Hall, recycle it right there, in this green bin.
Our recyclables will now be sorted at their destination rather than having to be shipped in separate trailers for each commodity. Kindly remember to put your clean paper, along with empty bottles, cans and cups, into these bins. Finish off that last sip of coffee before dropping the cup and lid into these containers. You don't want to turn the newspapers inside into a pulpy mess that can't be recycled. The last few ice cubes from your cup of soda can be poured out at the base of a tree or shrub, giving our plant life a little extra water as it melts, and making your cup ready to be recycled. And please, please... only clean paper in the bins. No greasy burger wrappers or oily pizza boxes. Those are still trash, not recyclables.
Adding coffee cups to the list of things we can now recycle right on the street will literally amount to tons of waste that will be recycled rather than trashed in Provincetown over the summer. We thank the DPW and the town recycling committee for their ongoing efforts to make recycling easy as pie.

No comments:

Post a Comment