The strain of recycling

The city of Bloomington has a great recycling program, but it is a program that is hardly used to it’s full potential. There is certainly no lack of access to recycling facilities around the city for those greenies that would like to make their planet just a little more sustainable, but the reality is that the number of participants in such activities is pathetic.

Particularly in apartment complexes, where recycling is harder to find than a fish in the desert, the fact of the matter is that the effort needed to recycle far exceeds the satisfaction of doing so. It is much easier for me to walk one hundred feet out of my front door to the dumpster with all of those recyclables than to collect a pile of stinky, leaky, dirty cans and bottles, among other things, then throw them into my clean car and haul them to the nearest recycling facility. This, I strongly suspect, is one of the most common problems among apartment complexes that so conveniently keeps a large population from doing one of the simplest, yet extremely difficult, acts of sustainability.

Apartment complexes should be required to supply recycling dumpsters, considering the price of them may not even be anything, considering they will pay less on trash removal.

Drew Wolff
IU junior