No more separating recycling. No more driving to one of Albemarle County’s recycling centers. Lamentably, no more using the private curbside recyclers. I have written about recycling in Albemarle and Charlottesville’s urban ring several times over the years, and now one of the larger private haulers* has taken advantage of the new single-stream recycling facility.
From the HooK:
After years of being conditioned to think of recycling as a social responsibility, perhaps involving a drive to the McIntire Recycling Center with sorted cans and bottles, or making sure a curbside bin— as the City uses for certain easily-recycled materials— doesn’t contain forbidden materials, the Van der Linde way can be difficult for some to grasp.
Everything really can go in one bin. (ed note: bolding mine)
"Our biggest challenge, strangely enough, is communicating the simplicity of what we do here," says Van der Linde. "You dump your trash here. The only difference between us and a landfill is we dig through it with fancy, expensive machines and recover and reuse 90 percent of it."
Time Disposal (turn your volume down) – to whom I just switched – offers this single-stream recycling. For years, private haulers were required by the County of Albemarle to offer newspaper recycling, but since we don’t subscribe to newspapers anymore, didn’t find much value in this requirement.
Read everything the HooK has written about Van der Linde’s single stream recycling facility, and figure out for yourself whether Rivanna Solid Waste Authority should be suing Van der Linde (which they are doing) or lauding him. If a private contractor can do something better – more efficient and cheaper – than a government-backed entity, shouldn’t the citizens ask the government to back down?
* Charlottesville City offers curbside recycling as part of the taxes residents pay. In Albemarle County, private haulers – BFI, Time Disposal, Sandridge, McCauley’s – and I’m sure there are more – offer trash pickup.
* An enterprising web developer might find it worth their while to contact Time and offer to do a new website for them. 🙂
Update 30 July 2009: Dixon Trash Services comments that they too offer the single-stream recycling. Sweet.
Forgive me, i don’t get it – and their website doesnt help. So now Time disposal will be taking our trash to this new facility that sorts it for recyclable materials? Or is it a second “recycling-only” bin that we’d get from Time? When does this change take place with Time?
If this is good as it sounds, I’m really excited…
ps – does that also mean we get to take part in::
http://www.recyclebank.com/
?
Our trash disposal company in Albemarle, Dixon’s, also recently began providing curbside recycling through Van Der Linde.
Peter –
I think this is new as of the past couple months; I sent them an email last week but haven’t gotten a response yet.
I got a new trash can (which itself was a reason to switch – same one for four years gets a bit icky) and a recycling bin specifically for the recycling stuff. They picked it up today; plastic, glass and aluminum in the same bin. Nice.
That makes sense. Just emailed someone on the board of our HOA about adding it for our neighborhood.
Wouldnt it be great if they did recyclebank too? My parents have that up in Vienna, VA, and they are getting rewarded for recycling. What a great concept.
That is definitely good news, nice to see locales being able to take advantage of single stream. Anything we can do to make recycling easier, faster and cheaper in order to encourage greater use is a good thing. Hope you can find a way to encourage your friends and neighbors to participate, Jim!
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