Jacksonville chides recyclers for doing it wrong

Lenny Curry goes off-script on recycling.

Tag, you’re it: that’s the message from a new recycling information campaign from the city of Jacksonville.

The Lenny Curry administration is rolling out “The Recycling Partnership’s Feet on the Street” initiative, a “cart-tagging” effort which a media release from the city contends will “improve the quality of recycling in single-stream curbside recycling bins by providing residents personalized and real-time curbside recycling education and feedback.”

“Even the most ambitious and well-meaning recycler can unintentionally put something that shouldn’t be placed in the cart,” Mayor Curry said.

“Unfortunately, this costs taxpayer money, can damage our recycling facilities, and requires additional sorting and dumping of materials that cannot be recycled. Through the Feet on the Street Campaign, we are providing citizens with personalized feedback and raising awareness of what can and cannot be recycled. Together, we can ensure that our city recycles and recycles right,” Curry added.

The program’s goal is to ensure “items that are accepted for recycling that are empty, clean and dry, so they can circulate back into the recycling system to become new products or packaging.”

To that end, the city will employ “a comprehensive education and outreach strategy that involves a team of community-based observers visiting each resident’s cart and providing personalized and real-time feedback on how to improve what items should be in the cart.”

This program has been implemented in 70 cities, and it’s worked in some of them. The city claims “some communities (are) seeing a 57% decrease of nonrecyclables in recycling and a 27% increase in the overall capture of quality recyclables.”

Recycling has been a recurrent pain point for the city during Curry’s second term, with local leaders taking the unprecedented step in 2021 of pausing curbside collections, urging locals to take the materials and drop them off at city parks, a move that had calamitous results.

Back then, Mayor Curry chided people for incorrect sorting of materials. He also urged people not to dump garbage on the steps of City Hall out of “frustration,” noting that is, in fact, illegal.