Unpopular opinion: I stopped trying to get my whole town to recycle and focused on one street

For two years I tried pushing the city council in Springfield to expand curbside pickup, got nowhere. So last fall I just bought 20 blue bins and gave them to everyone on my block with a simple flyer about what goes in. Now our street's contamination rate is under 5%, the city says it's the cleanest stream they collect. Has anyone else had more luck with a small, hyper-local push instead of the big fight?

3 comments

3 Comments

wesley1392mo ago

Honestly that's a great point about starting small. The only thing I'd add is that the contamination rate is usually about people putting the wrong stuff in the bin, not about how many bins are out there. Your flyer probably did more than the bins themselves by making the rules super clear. I saw a neighbor putting plastic bags in ours for months until I just printed the city's guide and taped it to my lid. Sometimes the big fight misses the small, easy fix.

taylor_fox2mo ago

Totally stealing the flyer idea. My building's recycling is a mess, pizza boxes covered in grease next to bottles with liquid still in them. I'm gonna make a dumb simple picture guide, like a red circle with a line through a greasy box. The city's official PDF is twelve pages, nobody's reading that. Sometimes you just have to meet people where they are, which is apparently unwilling to read anything longer than a traffic sign.

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milar461mo ago

Yeah, I used to think more bins were the answer. But seeing how people actually use them changed my mind. A clear picture on the lid is way more helpful than another container.