Middletown Recycling Update - May 1st

Middletown CT

01 May, 2020

3:04 PM

Description

As you may have heard, City Hall and Middletown public buildings will continue to be closed until at least May 24th. The City is convening a group to discuss how to phase in a reopening. The Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day scheduled for May 9th in East Hampton has been rescheduled for August 1st. If you can't compost at home, please consider bringing your food waste to the recycling center. We collect it there at no charge and it goes to the anaerobic digester in Southington to make clean energy. Hopefully you aren't wasting a lot of food, but there's always peels and rinds, coffee grounds and egg shells to be disposed of. Food waste can account for 20-25% of our food waste and it does make a difference to divert it from the waste stream. The Recycling Center is open Monday – Friday 7am – 3pm and Saturdays 7am – noon. It is easy to maintain social distancing and just bring gloves (even a pair of winter gloves that you can wash after) to open the top of the food waste bin to drop your food scraps. Please no plastic bags (unless they are compostable). Food waste has to be emptied out of bags and containers. After some confusion, our Middletown stores are transitioning back to paper bags. Middletown did not suspend the ban on plastic bags, just the requirement to charge ten cents for them. I was on a national webinar yesterday and plastic recyclers reported that the increase in single use plastic bags has increased the demand for virgin plastic and reduced the demand for recycled plastic. That one action has had a significant impact on the recycling markets. If you notice Middletown stores still using the plastic bags, please let me know. More information can be found here.It does appear that some of the stores have removed their plastic bag and film recycling containers. This is a voluntary program and there is no requirement that retailers provide this program. Hopefully these will be replaced when life starts phasing back to normal. I have reached out to the State DEEP and the plastic film recycling folks to get their input on this. The curbside pink bag textile recycling program is being slowly phased back in in CT. We hope collection will begin in Middletown sometime in May, but no definite date has been set. In the meantime, please don't put textiles in your trash. Textiles can be brought to a collection bin at one of these locations. One of our friends shared this organization, Gowns4Good, which is collecting graduation gowns to make PPE for healthcare workers. Its easy to do, so if you have any gowns in the back of your closet, please consider donating them. https://www.gowns4good.net/.Please let me know if you have any questions. Stay safe and healthy and have a good weekend! Kim O'Rourke, Middletown Recycling Coordinator, 245 Dekoven Drive Middletown CT 06457860-638-4855 [email protected]