Ugly Recycling Bins

And what, exactly, would make recycling bins attractive? Wednesday, Sep 10 at 9 a.m., the Dallas City Council will discuss this.

Some members of the Dallas City Council feel that the green and yellow bins of AbitibiBowater -- found in private parking lots, but especially schools and churches -- are "shabby" and aren't emptied often enough. City Councilmembers have two solutions to this problem: 1) they want to limit the number of bins in any parking lot to two and 2) they want the bins hidden behind bushes or structures. The end result will be that the bins will fill up faster, since there will be fewer of them, unless no one can find them behind the bushes.

The paper recycling bins bring in extra money to the schools and churches that allow these bins in their parking lots -- $20 per ton of paper, according to the Dallas Morning News. This money, while not a substantial part of most budgets, would be missed if AbitibiBowater had to cut back on the number of bins in the area.

But it seems that money is the crux of the problem. The city of Dallas has plans to put its own ugly (or, perhaps attractive -- I haven't seen them) recycling bins into parking lots around Dallas. The money now going to AbitibiBowater would go to the city if AbitibiBowater could be pushed out of some of its areas. While I applaud Dallas for expanding its own recycling programs, this seems an awfully cynical way of going about it.

Source: Dallas Morning News, 09 Sep 2008, "Dallas City Council may restrict public paper recycling bins".

Update: The City Council decided to require recycling bins to be hidden behind screens and to be emptied once a week, starting December 31. AbitibiBowater had previously said they may have to scale back recycling in Dallas. Other recycling companies will probably have to scale back also.