Is it Thursday? Or Every Other Thursday?

BY EILEEN BRADY
​THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO

At least now I don’t have to remember whether it’s Thursday or Every Other Thursday. 
The city recently changed recycling pickup to become weekly, but it was just one reason that it’s not surprising that Wilmington’s curbside recycling rate is an abysmal 2.7 percent. 
It’s possible for communities to have successful curbside recycling programs. Ann Arbor, Mich. (population 22,000), has a 90 percent participation rate. Of course, people in Ann Arbor started getting serious about recycling in 1970, and Wilmington’s curbside program came along 35 years later. But in those 35 years, recycling has gone from obscurity to household word, so it’s not as if “curbside recycling” is a brand-new concept to Wilmington residents.
I love to recycle — not just for the altruistic benefit, but because it seriously reduces what’s in my trash can. 
I have lived in communities with successful curbside services and some without. When we moved back to Wilmington ...

a couple of years ago, I was surprised not to receive the familiar plastic recycling bin when I signed up for garbage pickup. 
Instead, we set up our own bins in the laundry room and tote them to the recycling site on West Main Street. We fight bees in the summer and frostbite in the winter, but we believe strongly in doing our part to reduce the stench of the landfill that often wafts down Nelson Avenue. 
I was thrilled to learn that the city would start a curbside program but laughed as soon as I heard of the program’s inherent impediments to success. First, those of us who are actually improving our environment have to pay out of our pockets to do so, whereas those who toss their Budweiser cans in the trash along with last night’s pizza boxes don’t have to pay at all.  
Yet a little quick research tells us that cities that couple economic or legal incentives to recycle reach have higher participation rates.
Most of us already know that Americans are motivated by cash.
Joe Ambivalent pays $20 a month for three cans of garbage to be carted off a week but Jane Concerned pays $26 to put her recyclables at the curb, thus reducing her garbage to one can a week. Why is the recycler financially punished?
Just as it takes $3-a-gallon gas to reduce nationwide sales of gas-guzzling SUVs, it takes increased cost for increased landfill waste to inspire many people to decide to start recycling. 
Another impediment to Wilmington’s curbside success is the fact that we have to trek downtown, to Ace Hardware or to the landfill to buy $1.50 bags instead of being given sturdy containers that can hold bulky cardboard as well as 100-ounce Tide bottles. 
It’s sad to drive through town after Christmas, seeing all those corrugated cardboard boxes that held toys being set at the curb for the garbage trucks instead of the recycling trucks. 
Recyclable paper and cardboard makes up 41 percent of the garbage tossed into landfills in Ohio, according to a study released last year by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. 
Yes, Wilmington’s bag system is a no-sort process, and I applaud that, but it is still a disincentive for a regular recycler to switch to curbing it, even though it’s supposedly a temporary measure. 
But why just dip Wilmington’s toes into the recycling pond? Recycling is a $30 billion-a-year industry, according to Jan Voelker, a supervisor in the Department of Natural Resources Division of Recycling and Litter Prevention.
More than 60 percent of the trash in Ohio’s landfills could be recycled instead of thrown away.
The growing mound at our landfill could be more than half its size if we had been recycling all along. Isn’t that reason enough for our city government to make it individually expensive to add to the heap?
I have purchased several $1.50 bags, but I have used them only for the chipboard — cereal boxes, tissue boxes, etc. — that the county sites won’t accept. You’d be amazed how many flattened cereal boxes can fit in those blue bags. 
So our blue bags appear at the curb a lot less frequently than if we were able to put a week’s worth in an open container and lighten my load every seven days. Which makes our family’s official participation level lower than it should be. 
At least now I know which week to place it at the curb.