Sunday: Tulsa officials pleased with acceptance of recycling program
By ZACK STOYCOFF World Staff Writer and ZIVA BRANSTETTER World Enterprise Editor on Sep 7, 2013, at 2:48 PM Updated on 9/07/13 at 2:54 PM
Stephanie McNeal (left) and Jasmin Dulan remove non-paper items from recycled trash as it zips by on a conveyor belt at the Tulsa Recycle and Transfer recycle site. Some 40 percent of the trash separation is done by human hands, while the rest is fully automated. MICHAEL WYKE/Tulsa World
Trash
Experts say cities nationwide have found simple and environmentally friendly ways to dispose of yard waste, but few of them would be practical in Tulsa, the city's trash operators say.
The city's trash board is suspending the pay-as-you-throw fee it charges for yard-waste collection, calling it a good-faith effort to mend fences after the revelation that yard waste is being burned like regular garbage.
Approaching the one-year anniversary of Tulsa’s curbside recycling program, city officials say they are pleased with how residents have embraced the program even though they acknowledge that things haven’t always gone as planned.
About 111,000 of Tulsa’s 116,500 trash customers requested a blue recycling cart as part of the curbside trash system that began Oct. 1. That was a huge increase from the 16,000 city recycling customers before the new program started, officials say.
But nearly 25 percent of the items Tulsans throw into those 96-gallon bins goes to the Covanta waste-to-energy plant, where the items are burned along with regular garbage and yard waste, a Tulsa World analysis shows.
Although most of that is waste the city has said it cannot recycle, about 4 percent is plastic containers the city continues to list on its website as among items that can be recycled.
Those containers — rigid plastics such as yogurt containers and cream cheese tubs — are not recyclable because no market exists for them, city officials say. They are known as plastic Nos. 3 through 7.
The city says it continues to ask residents to put such items in recycling bins in case a market does exist for them some day. It’s also easier than asking residents to try to determine which plastics are recyclable and which are not, officials said.
Items made from plastic Nos. 1 and 2 — mainly water bottles, pop bottles, milk jugs and laundry detergent bottles — are recycled into new products. Those plastic items represent about 6 percent of all recycled material in the city’s program during the five months of data examined by the World.
“The most important thing is that we don’t confuse people by putting stuff on the (recycling) list, off the list, on the list,” said Roy Teeters, the city’s interim solid waste manager. “We need the citizens to get used to this recycling before we start trying to change it.”
Read more in Sunday's World.
Trash
Experts say cities nationwide have found simple and environmentally friendly ways to dispose of yard waste, but few of them would be practical in Tulsa, the city's trash operators say.
The city's trash board is suspending the pay-as-you-throw fee it charges for yard-waste collection, calling it a good-faith effort to mend fences after the revelation that yard waste is being burned like regular garbage.
