New Recycling Sheriff in Town

So, over the holidays my mom-in-law pointed out something in the Gainesville Sun which was great news -- plastic recycling would include everything from type 1-7! That's an amazing change from when Waste Management was our garbage collectors. Now our garbage collection is being handled by Emerald Waste, and they seem to be either every optimistic or very foolhardy in their wide selection of recyclable materials. After not finding anything on the GRU site about this, I finally called their media person (the most harried yet knowledgeable of people in any organization) who told me that refuse and stormwater are the only types of collections that are billed by GRU yet handled by the City of Gainesville. On their website I found a press release about the switch over to Emerald.

Finally, after a little more hunting, I found the website that explained in detail what could be recycled and what could not. Most of the other sites said something like, "you can recycle yogurt cartons!" That just kind of insults a soul's intelligence when you proclaim stuff like that. What if my yogurt carton is lacquered rosewood? Can I recycle that? I need hard facts, people!

Also, there was absolutely no announcement of the fact that type 3-7 plastics was possible since January of last year! That's the most shocking -- there should have been something somewhere to make people aware of this -- at least, make me aware of this!

Fascinating! Here's a video made in August of 2009 (1 month before the Sept. press release) where they say you can't recycle pasteboard (cereal boxes), even though they said you could one month later. This is really, really confusing -- I'm going to have to contact that nice lady with the Waste Watcher program to get some more info on this.