The Green Team Guide To Hard To Recycle
Did you know Denver’s residential recycling rate is only 23%?
That’s only 1 in 5 households using those purple bins! Compared to other statewide leaders in residential recycling like Loveland (60%) and Boulder (57%), and champions of industrial recycling like Fort Collins (73%), Denver has significant room for improvement.
This is a huge opportunity for our city and state! In addition to the environmental implications of low recycling rates, Denver is missing out on the economic benefits of better recycling since a whopping $250 million worth of materials is sent to landfill each year [2] and the EPA has estimated that ton for ton recycling creates 7 times more jobs than land-filling does [3]. A greater commitment to these practices by residents and all of the city’s stakeholders can improve our environment and our society too.
Currently, more than 50% of what goes into the Denver landfill is yard and food waste. Organic materials in the landfill release methane gas which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 and traps 25 times more heat in the atmosphere. Denver offers an amazing weekly pickup service for all organic materials, but only 12% of eligible residents in the City utilize this service. In Congress Park, 23% of residents subscribe to the service which only costs $9.75 per month. City Park South has the highest subscription rate in the City at 34%. Let’s commit to matching City Park South! Call 311 to order your green compost cart today.
The Waste Diversion and Reduction Action Team
(a.k.a. the Waste Team) seeks to participate in the citywide dialogue about waste issues and improve waste diversion practices in Congress Park through three overlapping objectives:
- Improve Congress Park’s waste diversion rates by supporting citywide policy changes.
- Increase resident participation in public and private composting and recycling programs.
- Improve individual recycling and composting practices and reduce contamination through education and outreach. *
* Contamination is when non-recyclable materials end up in the recycling or compost bin. Contamination is costly to separate out and, when contamination rates are too high in bundles of recyclables, then recovery facilities will send them to the landfill.
Projects include:
• Developing and distributing a Hard-to-Recycle Guide
•Supporting the Denver Composting Challenge: Don’t Waste the Good Stuff – Start Composting Now!
• Partnering with Eco-cycle to support a Pay-As-You-Throw (PAYT) initiative for the City of Denver (What is PAYT?)
A 2018 Success:
In Fall 2018, our Leaf Drop team helped 116 Congress Park households divert over 1000 bags of leaves out of the waste stream. Through a partnership with the Denver Compost Collective, these were composted and used in community farms across the Denver Metro area. In Fall 2019, South City Park took over the Leaf Drop for this year. We hope to bring back an expanded Leaf Drop to Congress Park in 2020.
Want to get involved?
Please contact and/or join us if you wish to help with any of these projects, and especially if you have additional ideas that we might want to tackle.
Contact Tara at taratull@comcast.net OR Mike at Michael.port1@gmail.com
Recycling Resources
- Denver Recycles
- Colorado Public Interest Research Group and Eco-Cycle in Boulder partnered again to release The State of Recycling in Colorado 2019
2018 “Putting Plastics Out to Pasture” Event
See event summary below
Summary
On Saturday, April 21st (Earth Day), the Congress Park Neighbors Green Team volunteers hosted an information table in front of Berenices with the theme PUTTING PLASTICS OUT TO PASTURE to talk about ways to minimize single-use plastic pollution which is impacting lands, wildlife, and oceans. They talked with neighbors about ways to reduce plastics in our daily lives and provided information about national and international efforts to reduce use of plastic bags, cups, food containers, and straws. A hit at the event was the ever popular Moo-pardy (based on the old favorite Jeopardy) complete with lights and brightly colored envelopes containing the answers to the questions about the impact of plastic on our environment. Everyone was a winner and got a prize just for talking with us! The theme for Earth Day this year was to end plastic pollution-let’s do our part and work hard at it during Plastic Free July! Be on the lookout for additional table events in our neighborhood-we promise we aren’t selling anything and would like to hear your ideas on how to help with plastic pollution!
2018 Plastic Free July
Visit the website at http://www.plasticfreejuly.org/ for sign-up for the challenge to refuse single-use plastics in the month of July (and hopefully it will help us change our use of plastics forever!)
The plastic bottles, bags and takeaway containers that we use just for a few minutes use a material that is designed to last forever.
The problem-
- These plastics break up, not break down – becoming permanent pollution are mostly downcycled (made into low grade product for just one more use) or sent to landfill
- ‘escape’ from bins, trucks, events etc. to become ‘accidental litter’ end up in waterways and the ocean – where scientists predict there will be more tons of plastic than tons of fish by 2050
- transfer to the food chain – carrying pollutants with them
- increase our eco-footprint – plastic manufacturing consumes 6% of the world’s fossil fuels
Every bit of plastic ever made still exists and in the first 10 years of this century the world economy produced more plastic than the entire 1900’s!
Picture With solutions.
More than 6 out of 10 of us are already refusing plastic shopping bags, avoiding pre-packed fruit and veg, picking up other people’s litter and avoiding buying bottled water.
Help by choosing to be part of the solution by:
- Avoiding products in plastic packaging (choose alternatives)
- Reducing where possible (opt for refills, remember your reusable shopping bags)
- Refusing plastics that escape as litter (e.g. straws, takeaway cups, utensils, balloons)
- Recycling what cannot be avoided
Plastic Free July #choosetorefuse
[1] http://ecocycle.org/take-action/zerowastecolorado
[2] CDPHE, 2016. Colorado Integrated Solid Waste and Materials Management Plan. Accessed at www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/Integrated-Solid-Waste-Materials-Mgmt-Plan.
[3] “Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: 2016 Recycling Economic Information (REI) Report” (United States Environmental Protection Agency, October 2016), https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-05/documents/final_2016_rei_report.pdf.
