By Dave Dahl
SPRINGFIELD – A new report says too many Illinoisans are doing it wrong: by not cleaning things before they throw them into the recycling. Not only are we throwing – basically – trash into the blue bin, nobody will take it.
The Illinois Public Interest Research Group is out with a report, “The State of Recycling in Illinois.”
“The big change that’s happened over the last year or so is that East Asia has raised its threshold for the amount of contamination they will accept,” said Illinois PIRG’s Abe Scarr, “In most curbside recycling programs, people put everything in one container, people don’t always throw the right things into it, things get contaminated. For years other nations have accepted it and worked to recycle material, but that’s decreasingly an option.”
Scarr says one solution would be to increase the quality of what we use in the first place – and, possibly, bring back deposit bottles.
Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected].
