Chris Leone

As a follow up to my last post about trying to recycle in Richmond, VA, I’d like to share with you my experience of what it took to do the right thing in this town. 

As a recap, I live in downtown Richmond, Virginia. Finding a place to recycle my empty bottles and glass has turned into much more of an effort than it should be - even for a guy willing to go through the effort.

In my kitchen, an empty moving box temporally housed over one month’s worth of empty ginger beer glasses, wine bottles, water bottles, etc. I could no longer deny that it was time to time to get rid of it all and the trash dumpster was not an option.

I drive a VW coupe. It’s new and it’s clean and I didn’t want to chance dirty bottles flying around in my backseat, so I enlisted the help of my buddy and his pickup truck on a beautiful sunday afternoon to drive me to the closest recycling depot - about three miles away. 

Turns out, this particular recycle location was closed on Sundays. In a totally non-intentional effort of making someone’s Monday start of worse than it needs to, I left my boxes at the gate. I figured if I brought them the 2.97 miles here, they could anchor the last .03. 

Here’s a quick list of why this experience is a very poor reflection of Richmond’s recycling efforts.

• No convenient access within or around my building
• No convenient access within my block
• The need to travel by motor vehicle to deposit my recycling
• Recycling can be dirty so I had to ask a friend for help
• The nearest location was closed on the most convenient day for me (and I’m assuming several others) to toss their recycle. 

I can deal with these “inconveniences” but the point is other people can not. People, especially when they are apathetic, take the easier solution. In this case, that means plastic and glass in the trash.

Here’s another Richmond Recycle folly. When I Google “Richmond Recycle,” the first two organic results are for Richmond, British Columbia and Richmond, UK. This wouldn’t be an issue except organic results are affected by my location. If I’m in Richmond, Virginia, my organic results should be filtered to reflect relevant Richmond, Virginia recycle pages - regardless of whether or not I type Virginia in my search query. Apparently, the presence of Richmond, Virginia recycle is so scarce on the internet that it still doesn’t show at the top.

That doesn’t give me confidence the situation is going to get any better anytime soon.

This is pathetic. I’ve lived in my new place coming on three months now and I still can’t find a simple, easy recycling solution in downtown Richmond. I’ve asked around, I’ve Google’d my butt off finding little to nothing. Pathetic.

It looks like in order to do the right thing by recycling, I’ll have to lug my collection of bottles and glass into my car and drive somewhere that will take it. Remember, I’m not in some remote shack out in the country, I’m in the middle of the CITY OF RICHMOND, VA; the state’s capital. We should be setting the example. So where do I have to go to recycle my stuff? About 3 miles away. That doesn’t seem terrible, but how many people are going to go out of their way to drop off some empty cans? Ironically, by getting in my car and driving, I’m burning fuel, so I can ultimately do something good for the environment.

Is this not screwed up?

Japan has it figured out. For nearly every public trash can there are multiple recycling options. For instance, if I have a soda bottle, the bottle goes in one bin, the paper gets torn off and thrown in another (the wrapping is perforated for this exact purpose), and the cap gets thrown in a third. Excessive? Not for them. Could Americans pull it off? Not at this rate. 

My proposal: For EVERY public trash can, there is a second can along side of it for recycle. If we’re feeling a little wild and crazy, make it two more cans, or even THREE! The point is to ALWAYS provide the option to recycle waste. You can’t convince people to do extra work when they don’t see a clear measurable benefit to themselves. That’s just the society we live in. So let’s dumb this down and make it easy for people to do the right thing.