St. Cloud Recycling Program Expands Options Beyond the Blue Cart

(KNSI) – As Earth Day arrives on Wednesday, the City of St. Cloud is reminding residents that the city’s recycling program goes well beyond the familiar 95-gallon blue cart at the curb.

Assistant Public Works Director Dan Legatt told KNSI News the curbside program, which went to the big blue carts in 2013, accepts common single-use household items, including milk jugs, yogurt containers, cardboard, glass, paper products, tin, and aluminum.

Legatt says the most important thing residents can do is make sure items are clean before tossing them in the recycling cart. “If items are collected and they’re contaminated, so if it’s a peanut butter jar that has peanut butter in it, or a yogurt container that has yogurt in it, those items, when they are collected, if they do contain food in them, they are considered contaminated.”

Contaminated items get kicked out as residual at the material recovery facility and never make it to the end market.

Another common mistake is tossing plastic bags or bagged recyclables into the cart. Legatt says film plastics cause two major problems. Bagged recyclables get pulled off the sorting line as residual, and loose plastic bags wrap around conveyor belts and rollers, forcing the facility to shut down equipment for extended periods to cut the material out. Plastic bags can instead be dropped off at some local grocery stores.

Legatt recommends residents use the county’s online Waste Wizard tool when they’re unsure about a specific item. “There’s so many opportunities to recycle a lot of the items that are going in the garbage carts, or the garbage bags, if you use the bag system. We want folks to be aware that there are resources out there to find alternative methods to recycling a lot of common household items.”

The city contracts with a material recovery facility in Inver Grove Heights to have its recyclables sent there. There, workers and optical sorters separate plastics, metals, paper, and cardboard. Legatt says the company has assured the city that much of the sorted material is sold to end markets within Minnesota.

The city has expanded options in recent years for things that can’t go in the blue carts. That includes drop-off locations for cooking fats, oils, and greases at City Hall, the Public Works building, and the compost site on 33rd Street South.

For other items, Legatt points residents to Stearns County Household Hazardous Waste, which accepts batteries, paints, pesticides, herbicides, automotive fluids, pool chemicals, propane cylinders, and aerosol cans.

As of January, the county also accepts electronic waste, including computers, printers, cell phones, and TV monitors, with a $10 fee for items with a screen. A mobile unit visits area cities four or five times a month for residents outside St. Cloud.

Beyond curbside and drop-off recycling, St. Cloud also offers weekly yard waste collection, Christmas tree pickup in the winter months, and the city-run compost site. About 30% of the material the city collects curbside is residential recycling.

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