Councilors aim to reduce recycling contamination

City councilors from the Birmingham metro area, including some from Mountain Brook, are making a push to educate residents about what they can and can’t recycle.

They’re even staging a competition to measure the effectiveness of their message.

Starting in November and ending in April, Homewood, Mountain Brook, Hoover, Vestavia Hills, Mulga and Tarrant will participate in an inter-city recycling challenge. The city with the greatest reduction in its recycling contamination rate will choose a charity to which officials from the other municipalities will donate. Birmingham Recycling and Recovery also will donate $2,500.

“We want people to be intentional about what they’re doing,” Homewood Councilwoman Jennifer Andress said. “This is going to save us money in the long run, and we want this to be successful.”

Andress is part of a councilors’ roundtable that meets monthly and includes representatives from the municipalities participating in the recycling challenge. Hoover’s Casey Middlebrooks spearheaded the roundtable’s formation and helped select recycling as an issue to tackle collectively. Andress said the recycling contamination rate across the area is well over 30%, with Homewood and Vestavia Hills checking in at 32% and Mountain Brook and Hoover at 37%.

That means BRR, which receives recyclable materials, can’t process and sell those items. This includes any items enclosed in a bag.

“They might receive, for example, a garbage bag full of recycling,” said Virginia Smith, Mountain Brook’s council president and a member of the roundtable. “Everything in there is clean recycling, but because it’s in the plastic garbage bag...it’s considered contaminated.”

As a result, items that could have been repurposed wind up in a landfill instead.

Members of the roundtable visited BRR this fall to learn about its operation. Andress said she had heard about contamination but wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “It was gobsmackingly eye-opening,” she said.

While a lot of people think they can toss anything plastic into a recycling bin, that’s simply not the case, Andress said. BRR encourages people to toss items into a garbage can rather than into a recycling bin if they’re not fully confident the items can be recycled.

“When in doubt, throw it out,” Andress said. “Everything needs to be clean, empty, dry.”

Mountain Brook Councilwoman Alice Womack said the trip to BRR was enlightening. It allowed her to identify items she was recycling that shouldn’t be recycled, such as plastic bags, and items she wasn’t recycling that should be, such as aluminum cans.

“I am a better recycler because of it,” Womack said.

Andress said the cost of recycling is rising, and those costs are getting passed along to cities that provide it as a service to residents. “All of our contracts are coming up right now with our haulers, and they’re all outrageous,” Andress said.

Reducing contamination rates can help offset the cost increase. “It’s not a problem that we should be passing on,” Smith said.

For more information about the recycling competition, search Inter-City Recycling Challenge on Facebook.