Residents in Windsor may have noticed their recyclables remained on the curb recently after the city was forced to take a closer look at what goes in blue and red boxes.
That was the case for a listener who tells AM800 News she's never done a very good job sorting items and city contractors always picked them up — that changed last week when her boxes remained by the curb.
Manager of Environmental Services Anne Marie Albidone confirmed the city is looking for ways to keep the amount of items not intended to be mixed together to a minimum so they can be repurposed.
"Some people may not realize that once we take the recyclables from them we then have to sell those recyclables to a market that's going use them for something else," says Albidone. "Some of those markets are getting much stricter in what they accept."
She tells AM800 News leaving boxes curbside so soon was a miscommunication with the contractor.
"They started leaving behind some boxes that were contaminated. At this point we're not quite ready to go to that step," she says. "We want people to keep recycling like they were and our contractor has gone back to collect a lot of those boxes that they've left behind."
Albidone says the city is performing an audit to get a better idea of common sorting mistakes.
"Once we have all our information from these audits of the recyclables coming in, then we're going to take that opportunity to communicate with our residents to let them know some of the common things we're finding that really shouldn't be in our recycling," she added.
Loads of recycling that can't be sorted to acceptable levels wind-up in area landfills, according to the city's web-page.
— with files from AM800's Rob Hindi.