Our Recycling Challenge

Dear Resident,

For those of you who have watched the 2016 budget work sessions, one of the highlights (or actually lowlights) that was discussed is the state of recycling in Ridgewood today. This is by no means a problem unique to Ridgewood.
 
Our curbside recycling program began in 1991.  We ask our residents to separate their recycling into different streams and to use the beige recycling barrels that we provide to you.  We sell our recycling products to processors and in the past have collected enough fees to significantly help in offsetting the expense of running this program.  The level of fees is under siege and has actually decreased 18% over the last 3 years from $332,552 to $266,232; a further decline is anticipated in 2016.

This is not a Ridgewood-specific challenge. Based on global issues, predominantly the China crackdown dubbed Green Fence, recycling processors are finding it increasingly difficult to supply China, a major global recycling processing center, with recycling products. China is rejecting containers of waste it deems are contaminated or are not sorted appropriately.  

Which brings us back to our challenge in Ridgewood……

Our recycling processor has, with little notice, tightened their standards for the product that we provide to them. We therefore must provide the recycling processor with the most pristine product that we can – this means that it is so very important that we improve the quality of our recyclables. 

One particular problem is the inclusion of plastic bags with your recycling – this is not allowed. When mixed in with other recycling, plastic bags get caught in the machinery at the recycling plant at times causing the facility to shut down their sorting equipment to manually remove entangled bags.  When the processor has to manually separate this material from our stream, the Village loses revenue and pays for the disposal of the material as garbage. Not intermixing plastic bags with your recycling has always been a rule since the inception of our recycling program but has not been strictly enforced because the market was accepting the product without question.  Plastic bags must be placed in your trash or recycled at Stop & Shop, Whole Foods Market and Acme.

Besides not intermixing plastic bags with your recycling, you can help us even more by following good recycling practice which you can find either in the 2016 Green Guide that was mailed to your home earlier this year or on our Recycling Website or by calling us at 201-670-3373.

I have touched on the Ridgewood economic challenges above……but a crucial point is that recycling is good for our world…..this should be reason enough for us to try to do better as a community.  We have also challenged our recycling team to come up with new and different ways to enhance our program. As usual, we would love to hear your ideas on this – I know that we have many residents who are passionate about this issue.

We look forward to working with you on this effort.


Best, 

Roberta Sonenfeld
Village Manager
201-670-5500, ext. 203

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