RecyclingMonster - Coronavirus-motivated staffing changes at Wicomico County Solid Waste have halted the county's ability to process recyclables.

Curbside recycling pickup by the city of Salisbury has been halted since March 23, with the city directing residents to either hold on to their recyclables until service is resumed or drop them off at the county's dropoff locations around the city. 

But recycling dropped at these sites is currently not being processed — it goes to the landfill, said Mark Whitelock, Wicomico County's deputy director of public works.

"I wish I had another way," Whitelock said. "But with the resources I have, and the things I have in front of me, I have no other way."

The majority of the work related to processing recycling for the county is done by prison inmates, Whitelock said. The 10 inmate workers who usually separate recyclables were pulled from their posts due to the risk of contracting COVID-19, bringing the sorting process to a standstill.

Items dropped off at the county's recycling dropoff locations in the days immediately following the recycling plant's closure quickly built up beyond the county's capacity to store them.

"We pride ourselves on our recycling rates and the things that we do," Whitelock said. "To see it turn around ..."

Inmates are also typically the workers who go house to house on garbage collection trucks emptying bins into the compactor, Whitelock said. The city lost that workforce as well, he said.

When waste is recycled, it preserves natural resources, reduces pollution, saves energy and saves space in landfills, according to the city's website. Landfills cost millions of taxpayer dollars to build, so increasing the landfill's lifespan by reducing inputs saves taxpayer dollars.

Despite these benefits, recycling jobs have been deemed nonessential under the state's stay-at-home order. Trash pickup, however, has and will continue because built-up litter and refuse are direct hazards to public health.

But trash pickup poses its own health risks to workers in the age of COVID-19 because a worker could become exposed to the virus via contact with contaminated items, Whitelock said. While Wicomico County has provided its workers with face masks, gloves and hand sanitizer, and has changed workplace norms to allow essential workers to practice social distancing on the job, safety is still a concern, he said.

For those concerned about the halt in recycling, it is important to remember that recycling comes third in the adage of "reduce, reuse, recycle," said Alyssa Massey, sustainability coordinator for the city.

Buying fewer packaged items and reusing those items at least once before throwing them away helps reduce the volume of each household's trash and recycling. It is also an option to hold onto recyclable items until service is restored.

Recycling in the city of Salisbury is already challenging due to the limited number of items the system can accept, which leads to a lot of contamination via "wish-cycling," Massey said. For example, Salisbury residents can only recycle plastics number 1 and 2, which disqualifies items made of thinner, softer plastic, like yogurt containers. 

When the wrong items get thrown in the bin, it means more work for the inmate sorters, a greater risk of damaging sorting equipment and a higher chance that the contaminated load won't be recycled at all.

For the partial month of March, the city reports it collected about 23 tons of recyclable items and about 7 tons of cardboard (recycled separately), along with about 713 tons of trash.

Because of the changes to the recycling program, it is impossible to know whether stay-at-home policies have led to more or less recycling than normal, Massey said.

Courtesy : www.delmarvanow.com