David Luna
Many citizens have expressed concerns regarding recent changes to Mesa’s recycling program. I have enlisted the City’s Environmental Management and Sustainability experts to help shed light on these developments.
Recycling Today
The global recycling industry has experienced dramatic change over recent years and its effects are being felt across the United States, including here in Mesa. You may have heard that several U.S. cities are discontinuing their recycling services, reducing their list of accepted items, or finding it necessary to charge additional monthly fees to cover the rising costs associated with recycling.
All recyclable materials are first delivered, sorted, and prepared for transportation at a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). Most municipalities, including Mesa, do not own their own MRF. Instead, they have contracts with third party vendors.
The recyclables are transported to both domestic and international markets. However, several international markets, including one that purchased approximately 30 to 40 percent of the recyclable material generated globally, stopped buying material due to the excessive amount of contamination they were finding in the imported bales of material.
Imagine you are a paper mill opening a bale of paper and also finding carpeting, diapers, garden hoses, plastic tarps, food waste and yard waste in the bale. To avoid becoming the world’s landfill, decisions were made to no longer import material. This in turn weakened demand for material and in some cases, for certain types of items, market demand no longer exists.
The Role You Play
To help sustain Mesa’s recycling program, please continue to recycle, but recycle right. Only place empty, clean and dry accepted items into your recycle barrel.
And while recycling helps manage our waste stream, we should always reduce and reuse first. Avoid single-use and single-serving products whenever possible. Buy longer lasting items and decrease replacement frequency. Following these guidelines will reduce the amount of waste we generate.
Mesa will continue to evolve its recycling program to adapt to the current recycling industry trends. For a current list of accepted items in Mesa’s recycling program, please visit MesaRecycles.org.
The City of Mesa, your neighbors, and myself appreciate your efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle right!
As always, if I can be of service to you, or if you wish to speak with me, I can be reached via email at district5@mesaaz.gov, or by phone at (480) 644-3771.