Reuse, reduce, recycle.
Essex mayor Sherry Bondy is leading an initiative with friends to help recycle old blue and red recycling boxes.
Residents started to use their new wheeled blue carts from Circular Materials as of January 1, leaving many without space to house their old recycling bins.
Bondy says they wanted to collect the bins to either provide them to individuals needing or wanting them for alternative uses, or to properly dispose of them.
Over one weekend, Bondy says 250 recycling bins were collected at four drop off locations: Harrow, McGregor, Colchester, and the heart of Essex.
Bondy says the collection was successful.
"We know many people kept theirs to use for recycling in the garage, and gardening, but there are some people that don't have space... there's so many bins now. So if they really did want to get rid of them, or some were really busted, so we have four drop off locations, one in Essex, one in Harrow, one in Colchester, and we collected over 250 bins."
She says other residents wanted additional bins.
"People were coming by, they wanted to use them for gardens, they wanted to use them for storage, we had some teachers that wanted them for their classroom. So, a lot of the bins got reused."
She says the bins are being properly recycled.
"There's still about 100 that are broken - like really broken - that will have to be brought to the depot, and the [Essex-Windsor] Solid Waste Authority said they are grinding them up and recycling them."
Bondy says they've extended the drop off dates until April 4.
The locations to drop off include: 15 Iler Avenue in Essex, 111 Island View Lane in Colchester, 12009 Ducharme Lane in McGregor, and 252 Wellington Street in Harrow.
At the end of February, the City of Windsor collected over 10,000 red and blue bins to be properly recycled.