Originally Posted by :
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Trash day is going to change for thousands of Kansas City residents, and bag tags could be a thing of the past in about a year.
Supporters of the switches said it’s going to be a game-changer when it comes to keeping Kansas City clean.
Currently, people living inside Kansas City limits put trash in bags and place the bags at the curb. Recycling goes in a small, open bin next to the trash bags.
The problem is on windy days, recycling gets blown away and ends up all over the city. Animals can also rip open the plastic bags, leaving more trash to scatter in the wind. It’s a problem residents say they’ve seen for years.
“You can go around the neighborhood right now, and there’s someone who’s moved out of the house, and its thrown out there on the sidewalk,” Virginia Flowers, Vineyard Neighborhood Association, said.
“Our neighbors, if they forget to put their trash out, it sits out until maybe the next trash day. The animals tear it up and there it is.”
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said that will begin to change in about a month.
Last year, city council members approved a plan to spend $5.5 million and buy 160,000 recycling carts with lids. Part of this funding came from a $1.5 million grant.
Residents will begin receiving the free bins in the coming weeks.
“We have too much trash in Kansas City. We wanted to make sure that we were working actively to clean up more. One of the biggest problems is recycling with our open bins right now,” Lucas said.
“You see paper, everything blowing about neighborhoods every recycling day. This will help cut down on a lot of that waste that’s just going about the community, and it will allow people to recycle a lot more with this much larger bin.”
“The lid on the top is also very important to us,” City Manager Brian Platt said. “One of the challenges we’re seeing and noticing that’s causing some trash and litter on our streets is our recycling bins right now are open. When the wind blows the recycling just blows over the neighborhood.”
There are enough of the recycling carts for every home in Kansas City, but getting one of the new bins is not mandatory.
“I know a lot of people have said maybe ‘we have a small bungalow, we don’t want a bin this large.’ You can keep your old recycling bin, but they will be available for every single family residential home in Kansas City. That’s about 162,000,” Lucas said.
“We are getting them out and about. Thanks to our taxpayers who are helping fund this program. And this is just one part of our cleanup in KC.”
Another part of cleaning up the city’s trash problem is still in the works. Right now the city council hopes to provide similar trash bins for homeowners starting May 1, 2024.
“As we know, putting out trash bags on the curb as we do in Kansas City leads to dogs getting through, so many other things. As somebody who has diapers in the trash some time for my 2-year-old, I really don’t like picking it up if a dog’s gotten through before,” Lucas said.
“We have to clean this city up,” First District Councilman Kevin O’Neil said. “I mean it literally is the number one topic right behind violence in every neighborhood meeting I go to.”
Leaders said this is a part of an effort to keep the city clean, especially with major events headed our way.
“We want to make sure that as we’re doing big events in Kansas City — the NFL Draft, the World Cup in 2026, and events large and small in between — that we are building a cleaner city,” Lucas said.
“I think it would benefit our trash here. We would love to put them in there, put our trash in those bins and roll them out,” Flowers said.
The trash bins are expensive, according to Lucas, which is part of the reason why they are not available at the same time as the new recycling carts.
Lucas also hopes to expand the leaves and brush pick-up program and create a new program for household compost.
More information on how people can request the recycling carts will be released soon.
Originally Posted by scho63:
So, we are all supposed to be recycling experts? :-)
Please do provide a really nice of what I can and cannot recycle. I think most people are TRYING to do the right thing.
Fuck the waste companies it TOO much recycles come back. :-)
I simply googled it when I moved to Arizona... why just throw random shit in a bin when 5 minutes of reading can clear it up? :-)
And yeah, they are terrible at education, when all they need to do is slap a QR code on the bins. Hell, I get shit from APS constantly via snail mail and email about how to best use electricity and so forth... a mailer on recycling would be far more useful. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Jewish Rabbi:
I’m pretty sure I’ve read the majority of recycling ends up in landfills anyway
Yeah its a joke here
This is the list of non-recyclable items here
We apologize but please note that the following items are NO LONGER accepted in KCUnited's city recycling program due to low market demand and/or excessive contamination:
Cereal boxes, frozen food packaging, tissue boxes, cracker boxes, detergent boxes, soda case boxes, and other paperboard items (these items are processed differently than cardboard and regular paper)
Originally Posted by KCUnited:
Yeah its a joke here
This is the list of non-recyclable items here
We apologize but please note that the following items are NO LONGER accepted in KCUnited's city recycling program due to low market demand and/or excessive contamination:
Cereal boxes, frozen food packaging, tissue boxes, cracker boxes, detergent boxes, soda case boxes, and other paperboard items (these items are processed differently than cardboard and regular paper)
Here in Charlotte our recycle bins are black and the trash bins are green.
It's dumbest fucking thing I've ever seen. Seriously, who comes up with this shit? [Reply]
One of the better entrepreneurial ideas I've seen is this guy around here fabricated a hydraulic lift system with a power washer setup in the back of his truck. Its fitted specifically for the city trash/recycle bins.
Dude sells monthly and quarterly subscriptions and just drives around the east valley power washing bins with the push of a couple buttons.
Its probably more successful out here where its hot most the year and bins get super gnarly smelling quick but he's rolling pretty hard with just a truck, a power washer and some ingenuity. [Reply]
KCMO isn't nearly as restrictive as Arizona yet. It's all going to the same place anyway:-)
Items you can recycle curbside:
Office paper, junk mail, newspapers (without plastic rain bag), phone books, catalogs and magazines
Manila folders
Advertising inserts
Brochures
Corrugated cardboard
Carrier stock (i.e. cardboard soft drink and beer cartons)
Chipboard (i.e. cereal and shoe boxes)
Paper/hardback books
Plastic bottles with a neck #1 and #2 (look for the number inside the chasing arrow symbol), such as water and soda bottles, milk jugs and detergent bottles. Lids may now be recycled, too.
Plastic containers #3 thru #7 (look for the number inside the chasing arrow symbol), such as yogurt and margarine/butter tub containers
Cardboard egg cartons
Pizza boxes (No food)
Shredded paper (in paper bags)
Drink cartons
Aluminum cans and other metal cans
Clamshells (Deli or salad bar containers)
Aseptic containers (milk, juice and vegetable cartons)
Clean aluminum foil and foil pans
Items you cannot recycle curbside:
Glass
Plastic bags
Styrofoam, including Styrofoam egg cartons
Motor oil bottles and other automotive product bottles
Containers for household hazardous material
Paper towels, tissues or napkins, plates or cups
Gift wrap
Photographs, blueprints and hanging file folders
Bags that contained pet food, fertilizer, charcoal or kitty litter
Metal pots [Reply]
Originally Posted by scho63:
So, we are all supposed to be recycling experts? :-)
Please do provide a really nice of what I can and cannot recycle. I think most people are TRYING to do the right thing.
Fuck the waste companies it TOO much recycles come back. :-)
It's complicated. For recycling to work, you pretty much have to have everything 1) clean and 2) separated into materials that can be recycled together. That's necessarily labor intensive, so waste management companies have to make a choice between asking a LOT of consumers (my dad has 8 different bins in his garage for all the different materials, and he manually drops it all off at a recycling center) but having very low participation vs. making it EASY for consumers (single-stream recycling) and putting a ton of effort into sorting at the facility.
So OK, decision point 1: if you want to get people to do it, you have to make it simple. Fine.
But then the issue is that making it easy also makes it easy for people to fuck it up, both in unintentional ways (not understanding what can be recycled) and malicious ways (intentionally throwing trash into the recycle bin). And in some cases, a handful of people fucking it up can ruin entire loads of otherwise recyclable materials due to either contamination or just making it too laborious to go through the load and sort out all the stuff that can't be recycled.
So waste management companies have to decide whether they try and tech people how to be good recyclers at the middle school (recycle cans), high school (recycle cans and plastic bottles), 101 (recycle cans, plastics with allowed types, clean paper and cardboard), or 201 level (recycle cans, aluminum foil if it's in a large enough ball and clean, plastics that are clean, paper products, but not those that have a wax coating...). The better informed people are, the better recycling works, but the less people will pay attention.
So decision point 2: If you want to get people to do it right, you have to find a sweet spot between telling people every little detail they need to know and making it simple enough that everyone can understand it.
The result is that we just kind of live with something in the middle, though it does indeed result in a lot of recyclable materials being dumped in the trash. There's just not a great way out of it unfortunately unless you go hard on public education, which is often a futile exercise. [Reply]
Originally Posted by KCUnited:
One of the better entrepreneurial ideas I've seen is this guy around here fabricated a hydraulic lift system with a power washer setup in the back of his truck. Its fitted specifically for the city trash/recycle bins.
Dude sells monthly and quarterly subscriptions and just drives around the east valley power washing bins with the push of a couple buttons.
Its probably more successful out here where its hot most the year and bins get super gnarly smelling quick but he's rolling pretty hard with just a truck, a power washer and some ingenuity.
We get our bin cleaned every month. Same type of set-up. It costs us $12/month which is worth it to keep the trash bin from smelling like BEP's asshole the entire year. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Pasta Little Brother:
Look at that little boy scout
Read KC Uniteds list and realize what a big fucking joke this all is
Who could imagine the people picking up and sorting trash might be as intelligent as the idiots who get flustered figuring out which color bin to put stuff in.
Here's a quick video that might be more your style. Feel free to lay down for a bit afterwards if it gets too overwhelming.
Originally Posted by KCUnited:
One of the better entrepreneurial ideas I've seen is this guy around here fabricated a hydraulic lift system with a power washer setup in the back of his truck. Its fitted specifically for the city trash/recycle bins.
Dude sells monthly and quarterly subscriptions and just drives around the east valley power washing bins with the push of a couple buttons.
Its probably more successful out here where its hot most the year and bins get super gnarly smelling quick but he's rolling pretty hard with just a truck, a power washer and some ingenuity.
That's cool, I've used a power washer on mine a few times, but I'm lazy about it and it can get pretty nasty. [Reply]
