Do you know what to recycle and what’s trash? Many don’t, officials say

The City of Clearwater is calling on residents to be mindful of what they put in their recycling bins, after sharing that 50 percent of what crews collected as recycling lately ended up being garbage. Recycling is not universal, since what’s allowed all depends on where you live. "It could be filled with products in it that’s good, recycled products, but because it’s in a plastic bag it’s considered contaminated," said City of Clearwater Solid Waste Director Kervin St. Aimie. He said they’ve run into some problems lately with improper recycling ruining entire batches collected.

"The last couple of weeks we had more contamination than normal," said St. Aimie. "If we are over percentage of contamination, which is about 25 percent, the vendor then flags those loads and calls those contaminated loads. " Clearwater officials said in August they collected 32 tons of recycling that ended up being rejected by their vendor that processes the items. "The impact is we lose a whole load of recycling.

So, if that load is flagged, the vendor then reaches out to us, and it’s stamped as rejected. It’s sent to the county and the county uses it as trash at that point," said St. Aimie. It impacts the efforts of residents who are sorting the recycling in the first place and the workers driving the loads to the transfer station. "There’s always going to be a fee even though we send it to the landfill as trash or send it to recycling," said.