Blue bag off to good start

The Incline Village General Improvement District wishes to thank the entire Incline Village/Crystal Bay community for the outstanding participation and interest in the new community recycling program. This program is off to a great start, and we believe the benefits outweigh its drawbacks.

In the first month of collection, the program diverted 127.39 tons of recyclable materials, a 300 percent increase over previous monthly collection averages.

There have been concerns about the mixing of the materials.

According to the operations staff at the Cabin Creek Materials Processing Facility (MRF) in Placer County (the processing center for the blue bag materials), there are minimal problems with glass breakage. Even when the “crusher” trucks are used, the mass of all the other materials pads the glass and reduces breakage.

Yes, broken glass shards can contaminate the paper/fiber products.

However, the Cabin Creek recycling center handles many tons of materials daily; all delivered co-mingled.

The facility is equipped with both high-tech and manual mechanisms for sorting. The reclaimed materials are sold as recyclables according to differing grades of purity.

While use of a disposable “blue bag” may be problematic, the blue bags are themselves recycled, once they are opened at the MRF.

The blue bag program has allowed us to move forward to offer a greater number of materials in recycling collection. This system has worked very well for more than 10 years, in the neighboring communities of Truckee, Kings Beach and Tahoe City.

The concept of single stream recycling is expanding into the greater Northern Nevada area.

Reno officials are studying the feasibility of single stream recycling for the entire City of Reno. In the future, we hope to explore the options of more frequent collection, and a more permanent collection container/cart.

Interested community members are welcome to call the IVGID Waste Not program at (775) 832-1284 with additional questions about the blue bag program.

Madonna Dunbar, IVGID Resource Conservationist

Incline Village