Recycling Incentives

From experience, recycling is not the same from state to state and probably just as different from town to town. Our experience in Chicago and Florida were nearly identical, just rinse and put all items together in one bin. But in Colorado, this is not the case. (see previous post)

There was one difference between Florida and Chicago. Our town in Chicago had an interesting recycling system that built in a financial incentive for recycling. Each bag of trash required a $2.?? Sticker you bought at the grocery store, but recyclables were free. We made it a point to recycle absolutely everything and could sometimes make it by with only 1 or 2 bags of paid trash. We’ve had to be a bit more altruistic in our motivations for recycling here, which probably contributed to my procrastination in finding out the rules in our new town. In Illinois, new residents were sent a brochure explaining the system, but Colorado trash is all privately managed, and I wonder if the rules are different for each company. With our current company, we didn’t receive any information about recycling (that I know of). Technically, we get charged as a one can family or a two can family. Recycling helps to stay a one can family (though we could just buy a bigger can since ours is small).