HANCOCK COUNTY — When it comes to recycling, there can be too much of a good thing. An increased volume of recycled materials, especially cardboard boxes, has left bins in Hancock County overflowing.
“It’s been a problem all over the county,” said Dede Allender, director of the Hancock County Solid Waste Management District.
Allender has seen the problem with the recycling bin where she works, at the county’s Purdue Extension offices on Apple Street, and she’s driven by other overflowing bins. At Kroger recently, she saw a stack of cardboard boxes spilling onto the ground.
“It was a complete mess,” Allender said.
Allender is asking county residents to help out with the problem by making sure to collapse their cardboard boxes before throwing them into recycling bins, and by refraining from adding additional recyclables to a bin that is already overflowing. Spending extra time dealing with improper recycling creates a burden on the Solid Waste Management District.
The increase in recycling, Allender said, is probably another side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. With more people staying at home, they’re ordering more goods online, which arrive in cardboard boxes that need to be recycled.
Cardboard boxes have been in historically high demand since COVID-19 emerged. In December, The Washington Post reported that between June and October of 2020, box shipments were 34 billion square feet every month, a new record for the industry.
Even as other sectors of the economy have struggled, online shopping, which requires a lot of cardboard packaging, has continued to thrive. That’s shifted a lot of the burden of recycling packaging to consumers. Republic Services, one the biggest waste collection companies in the country, reported that its collection of recyclables from households increased by 25% from 2019 to 2020, while collection from companies dropped by 30%.
Tonya Galbraith, town manager in McCordsville, has also been dealing with the problem at the town’s public recycling drop-off. Residents have the option to sign up for curbside recycling pick-up with CGS Services, but they can also drop off recyclables in bins behind the town hall. Galbraith said those bins have become a problem in the past year.
“They have been used and abused,” she said.
The bins are frequently overflowing with cardboard boxes. McCordsville tried limiting the hours when recycling drop-off would be allowed, but that didn’t solve the problem. Galbraith said employees were spending hours per week smashing down cardboard boxes that weren’t broken down before being tossed into the bins.
Now, the town has installed a gate that can be locked when the recycling bins are full. They typically fill up in one day, Galbraith said.
Galbraith agreed that part of the problem is that people are receiving and recycling more cardboard boxes because of COVID-19 self-isolation. However, she added that there were also many instances of people throwing items into the bins that could not be recycled, in some cases contaminating the items that normally could be.
“We were finding tires in the recycling bin. We were finding paint cans in the recycling bin,” she said.
In addition to breaking down boxes and limiting their drop-offs to items that can be recycled, Galbraith advised people hoping to use bins to do so early in the morning — when fewer people may have already come by — or to sign up for curbside service of their own.