Written in response to a letter to the editor by Carolyn Lane (“Stop Contaminating Recycling,” published Sept. 6 in the Summit Daily News).
Summit County is expanding recycling programs thanks to voters who passed the Strong Future 1A ballot initiative last November. The free Food Scrap Recycling Program is now available at the Breckenridge and Frisco recycling centers, with new programs coming soon for glass, mattresses and carton recycling.
We at High Country Conservation Center strongly encourage you to continue recycling. When you recycle at the drop-off centers, those materials go to the Summit County Resource Allocation Park for processing. Recyclables are packaged into bales and sold.
Single-stream recycling — newspapers, plastics, cardboard, aluminum — is all baled together and sent to Denver for further sorting and sale. In this scenario, when contamination, or nonrecyclable items, are excessive, everything can end up in the landfill because it’s too difficult to pick out the trash.
I encourage you to join the High Country Conservation Center in educating your neighbors. While we work hard to help residents at the recycling centers, in the schools and in local businesses, we’re always looking for volunteers to serve as recycling ambassadors in our community.
This could mean helping with a tour of the Resource Allocation Park, supporting school composting or training residents how to be better recyclers. I invite you to email me at info@highcountryconservation.org to see how you can become part of the solution.