We’re talking trash over at Down With Absolutes. To be more specific, we’ve been discussing RecycleBank, the pilot “recycling for incentives” program going on in Wilmington that I posted about recently. According to Mike’s post, some people are upset about having of their weekly trash collection days replaced with recycling collection, but dropping regular trash pickup to once a week hasn’t been a problem at my own residence and doesn’t seem to be a problem on our block.
I’m glad someone is writing about the bad and ugly of the program, but I do think the good should be mentioned as well. For example, since the the start of the pilot program in July, my household has received the sweet total of $38.00 from RecycleBank.
It would be nice if there was a Delaware community related message board that could devote an area to discussion about RecycleBank to get a wider range of resident (as opposed to press) opinions, but I haven’t found one so far (if you know of one, let me know!). The Recycle Bank website has a testimonials section, but of course they aren’t going to include anything negative there.
Anyway, it will be interesting to eventually find out whether enough items are diverted from the trash bin to the recycling bin to compensate for only having one regular trash pickup per week instead of two. If not, maybe they can use the savings that RecycleBank claims the city will get from the program to add the second regular trash day back!
I would love it if we had something like that here. Not even for the money - although that would be nice - but just to force people to learn more about recycling, what they can recycle, and to penalize them if they don’t recycle. My goal for the past few months has been to recycle as much as possible, and it is amazing to see what I was casually throwing away before when I should have recycled instead.