Bill Karins, Meteorologist

Every major city has curbside recycling except Detroit. I say bring in the Feds

My mission started with a check of the 20 largest cities in the country. I wanted to know who doesn’t enforce or have curbside recycling. The results were encouraging with the exception of the city with arguable the “dirtiest” reputation... Detroit. Fair or unfair, when your nickname forces visualizations of greasy car engines, I’m not exactly going to associate cleanliness with the Motor City.

Curbside recycling is not offered or required in the City of Detroit. A recent article in the Real Detroit Weekly had a quote from the top recycling official saying that the city of Detroit is 30 years behind in their recycling efforts.

Like many other small towns that don’t offer curbside recycling, Detroit’s problem is money. Recycling may be great for the world, good for the conscience, but it’s horrible for the wallet. The business of collecting and selling recyclables is not profitable. The cost of hauling, collecting and sorting outweighs the selling price of the used paper, plastics and metals. Thankfully, many cities have voted to cover the differential with taxes or other allocated funds. Recently because of a growing financial deficit, the city of Baltimore considered doing away with their curbside recycling to save money. In the end, Baltimore decided that taking a step back during the green revolution was a bad idea.

So, if Baltimore and Detroit are struggling to finance curbside recycling how can we expect thousands of smaller cities to do it? The only answer I have is to make recycling state or federally regulated. If our environment is as sensitive to our waste as we now believe, then we have to do something about it. The tax and cost would be our tax for living the privileged lives we have here in this great country. No one wants new taxes but can you think of any better reason for a tax increase? Who knows, with better technology maybe a state or federal recycling program could become profitable.

When it comes to our conscience, going green makes you feel good. It’s been proven that when people have an easy option like curbside recycling, people participate. Let’s make this a bigger discussion than Detroit or Baltimore, let’s make it a state or country issue.

*Update: To Detroit’s credit, they are heading in the right direction, in the last few months they have added many drop off locations for recyclables throughout the city but still no curbside recycling.