Letter: Too many doing a sloppy job of recycling, or not recycling at all

By Letter to the Editor on March 22, 2023.

Dear editor,

Many of us are doing a sloppy job of recycling or not recycling at all.

At the city’s Kipling Street bins, there are lots of big cans of unwashed spaghetti sauce in the metals bin still labelled with the restaurant’s name from a local pizza place. Kudos to that restaurant for trying to recycle and maybe that’s OK for recycling, but I doubt it.

Then there’s a pile of fluorescent tubes, many of them broken, in the cardboard only bin. There’s always lots of stuff in the wrong bins.

At the transfer station in Dunmore there’s lots of cardboard in the garbage bins when the cardboard recycling bins are about 20 feet away. There are no plastic recycling bins there, so there’s also lots of recyclable plastics in the garbage bins. This plastic could be taken to the plastics recycling in Medicine Hat, but no.

To be fair, I think there are also many of us who are being conscientious and doing the best we can to recycle properly.

Sometimes, however, I think why bother with recycling when I can easily and quickly throw it all in the garbage with absolute impunity.

Is it sloth, or ignorance or laziness, or entitlement that makes us think we have no responsibility?

I think the City of Medicine Hat, Cypress County and neighbouring towns have done a good job of making recycling easy for most people. It’s not perfect, but it’s good. There are also recycling businesses in the city to make it even easier, but there’s a cost for that.

The workers who have to process the items in the recycling bins deserve plenty of praise for dealing with the sloppy recycling of some people.

As for those who just throw everything including recyclables in the trash, well maybe there’s some kind of garbage karma awaiting you.

Ray Marco

Dunmore

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