ACUA and Egg Harbor Township Use Tags to Improve the Quality of Recycling
When it comes to recycling, many
people want to do the right thing, but don’t always know what should be
included in their curbside recycling bin. That’s why ACUA recently teamed up
with Egg Harbor Township for a curbside inspection and tagging project to
spread recycling information and combat contamination in the recycling stream.
What is Contamination?
Contamination
includes a variety of items that can be harmful to workers, damage sorting
machinery or taint bales of material ready to be sent out to manufacturers.
This includes: plastic bags, which get caught in machinery and bring the
recycling facility to a halt; aerosol cans that can explode and become
hazardous to workers; and food or liquids left in packaging that can
contaminate perfectly good paper and cardboard (click
here for our full
guidelines).

Plastic bags get tangled in machinery and need to be cut out by workers. Many grocery stores accept plastic bags for recycling.
Due to global
changes in the recycling markets, recycling programs across the country have
been challenged to improve the quality of recycling to meet more stringent
requirements. So throwing incorrect items in your recycling bin will cause more
harm than good.
The best way to
strengthen Atlantic County’s recycling program is to only recycle correct
items.
Combating Contamination
ACUA is embarking on
a tagging initiative to improve the quality of recycling and help educate
residents. We first partnered with Egg Harbor Township to kick off the program.
ACUA employees, along with trained volunteers
from the Rutgers Environmental Stewards Program and Egg Harbor Township Public
Works staff visited three neighborhoods on four recycling days to visually
inspect recycling containers at the curb on collection day. Volunteers left a
“Great Job!” tag if the container looked clear of contaminants or an “Oops!”
tag if there were items that should be kept out of the recycling stream. To
keep the data accurate, residents were not warned about the project in advance.

Above is an example of a recycling bin that would receive an "Oops Tag." We can see plastic bags, caps on bottles and a plastic clamshell container which are not accepted in our recycling guidelines.

The photo above shows a recycling container free of contaminants.

Recycling bins were tagged with either an "Oops!" or a "Great Job!" sticker.
Tagging Results
The goals of this
program were to identify common recycling mistakes and contaminants, to measure
the effectiveness of informational “tags” on recycling behavior changes and to
provide information and feedback to residents – all of which were achieved!
The most common mistakes we found in
curbside containers were items in plastic bags, unaccepted plastics #3-7, pizza
boxes, plastic caps, trash items like napkins and paper towels as well as
containers that still contained liquid or food residue.
After four weeks of recycling inspections, the data showed
significant and positive results in the neighborhoods we inspected. Overall contamination
rates dropped 24% in the neighborhoods surveyed, and the presence of plastic
bags reduced by 43%.

This pilot project was a learning experience for
ACUA and will help us refine our future education and outreach to residents. We
have already begun replicating this successful project in Margate are hoping to
spread it elsewhere. Please contact
us if you are interested!
