Seeing red over green efforts: Our recycling debacle shameful

By Claudia Newcorn

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Phooey on the city for allowing the dictates of expediency to enable the potential demise of the blue bag recycling program.

"Tossed on the floor and run over by a bulldozer ... and taken to landfill."

First, it's taken 12 years to determine it's not working? Is this government efficiency or what? Shouldn't this program have been assessed within the first year and either corrected or cancelled due to failure to perform? And then evaluated a regular periodic basis?

Makes one wonder how many other programs are way overdue for evaluation, even as they drain the city's coffers. Instead, the hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted in not correcting the problem could have been allocated to other programs. But nope. Let's just keep on throwing good money after bad.

In the ever-growing urgency of the need to recycle, reuse and help our planet, it seems both depressing and bizarre that our city cannot implement a successful recycling program, particularly when citizens are willing and able to make the effort to recycle.

"The material is often not valuable enough to recycle ... "

Why does everything always come down to the almighty dollar? Why not look for ways to make the program cost effective? I have to believe that there are other cities and towns which have implemented successful recycling programs which we can learn from. Surely not every town in the U.S. has a failed recycling program!

If not blue bags, then let's repeal the Dumpster-diving law. If we can't recycle the aluminum cans and bottles without making a major expedition to a redemption center, then let's stop penalizing those individuals who want to collect the containers and submit them for whatever they're worth. They then reap the benefit of recycling them and they don't go into the landfill. Seems like a good option to me.

The fundamental underlying problem is the prevalent mindset that if it's not easy, cheap and convenient, why should we bother? Of course, the unpolitically correct definition of this phrase is laziness.

The recycling program apparently fails to fit these parameters, and it's easier to just let it dissolve than look for productive solutions.

I am sure they have to exist. Our family members are rabid recyclers -- so much so, that often our black garbage container doesn't go out for two to three weeks. There are no readily accessible can, plastic or bottle recyclers nearby, so we blue bag everything. We dump paper and everything else allowable in the green container -- and that does go out every week. There is a sense of quiet pride in knowing you're doing your little thing to help the planet.

Unfortunately, solid waste and the city don't feel that's enough to warrant an effort to make it work. What a shame!

Newcorn is an author and freelance writer living in Modesto. Contact her at columns@modbee.com.