Bye-bye blue bags? Time to 'Toter' recyclables?

"We're considering 'doing the blue' without the blue bags"

Mr. Blue has served Muncie for 23 years. MSD photo, 2019.

MUNCIE — The city’s 23-year-old blue-bag recycling program has been easy, convenient and pretty successful.

Muncie diverts roughly a third of its solid waste stream from the landfill, mirroring the national recycling rate and practically doubling the statewide rate.

But it might be time to replace the ubiquitous blue bags with blue Toters.

Mr. Blue, who made late night talk-show host John Oliver’s list of “creepy recycling mascots,” is already retired, basically.

Oliver once said Mr. Blue “appears to be either a bag of recycling or an asphyxiated sausage.” (The city of Niagra Falls’ “Totes McGoats,” who has been called a “terrifying, horrific goat-man hybrid,” was named the biggest creep by Oliver).

“We are considering ‘doing the blue’ without the blue bag,” Jason Donati, recycling educator at the Muncie Sanitary District, said at a recent League of Women Voters forum."But we need feedback on this. We want to hear from everyone about whether they think this is a good idea.”

One proposal under consideration is to discontinue the blue bags into which residents currently place recyclables (and in many instances also inappropriately dump a lot of other stuff).

Citizens who want to recycle could then opt to receive a 96-gallon blue Toter (the same size as the current, green trash Toters) in addition to keeping their green Toter for trash.

“We’d still be ‘doing the blue,’ technically,” Donati said, referring to the blue Toters and the blue-bag-program’s slogan.

(Mr. Blue is actually retired now “but still makes it out for special appearances on occasion,” Donati told me. Citing a newer mascot, he added, “Little Blue is our main guy now. He is related to Mr. Blue somehow.”)

“We want to hear from all of you about how we can improve our system,” Donati said several times at the forum. “I think our system is doing OK, but we can do better.”

Much of Muncie’s cardboard is landfilled. Photo by Seth Slabaugh

Take cardboard, for example.

Alluding to the increase in online shopping, Donati said, “A major issue is cardboard. Everybody gets everything in boxes.” And much of it winds up in the landfill, not in blue bags. Cardboard placed loose in the trash Toter or on the ground next to the Toter doesn’t get recycled.

“A lot of cardboard is going to the landfill that shouldn’t be going to the landfill,” Donati said.

Even more cardboard has been landfilled since corrugated packaging company WestRock, formerly RockTenn, ended its recycling partnership with local schools last year.

Another drawback to the blue-bag program is the bags themselves, the cost of which is expensive, and they don’t get recycled. They get incinerated in Indianapolis.

“Plastic bags are bad,” Donati said. “It’s always bothered me that we collected recyclables in plastic bags. I understand the convenience of it, but it’s driving me crazy. So getting rid of the blue plastic bags would significantly reduce the waste stream.”

While coupons redeemable for the blue bags are sent to nearly 90% of Muncie’s households, nowhere near that many households are recycling. Donati sees people walking down the street with blue bags full of laundry, trash, leaves and other things. When blue bags are used for garbage and other contaminants, it makes sorting waste at the municipal recycling facility messy and inefficient.

Still, “We’ve spent 23 years teaching people to do it this way, so we would have to figure out how to teach a new way of doing it but keep it simple,” Donati said. “The blue bag is convenient, except for needing a coupon to go to the store to get the bags.”

Muncie residents wouldn’t need to hassle with blue bags or coupons if they had a separate blue Toter into which they could loosely pile all of their recyclables.

That would also make sorting, baling and warehousing recyclables in the waste stream easier at East Central Recycling, the city’s recycling contractor, which operates at 701 E. Centennial Ave.

Donati displayed photographs of garbage trucks dumping bags of trash mixed with blue bags of recyclables mixed with garbage mixed with loose recyclables into big piles on the floor of the recycling facility.

Muncie’s mixed waste stream is messy to sort. Jason Donati photo

“People ask me if the loose recyclables in the pile — you can see the laundry detergent bottles and cardboard in there for example — get recycled,” Donati said. “No. The process doesn’t work that way. You see a lot of material in there that should be in a blue bag.”

The way the process works is that the blue bags are separated from the rest of the waste stream, then ripped open, conveyed and sorted by hand and machine before being baled and warehoused.

Under the proposal to have a green trash Toter and the optional blue recycling Toter per household, “we would have two separate trucks pick it up,” Donati said. “One truck would pick up the trash, then another truck would pick up the recyclables. The great part is there would be less contamination. You would drop the recyclables directly into the sorting line. It would skip the process that is nasty and not very efficient and get rid of the blue bags.”

Having separate Toters for trash and recyclables would make Muncie trendy. In fact, at recycling conferences, Donati doesn’t encounter any peers who “do the blue” like Muncie.

“From what we can tell, the trend is going toward loose, separate pickup of recyclables like what we are proposing to do potentially,” Donati told me.

I asked him about Toter proliferation, or Toter blight, if many households started having two or more Toters. As it is now, each household is already entitled to two green Toters, or more, for $5 a month per Toter. What will Muncie start looking like with even more Toters per household, one or two green ones plus a blue one? Toterville?

(In my neighborhood, you don’t even qualify for “Yard of the Month” if you keep your Toters out where they’re visible from the street).

“Toter congestion or ‘proliferation’ is a concern,” Donati said in an interview. “Some neighborhoods are bad about taking their Toters back in (from the street). A prime example is the college-student rentals on West Jackson Street. Some students leave their Toters out all week. The ordinance says 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.”

Residents are supposed to place their Toters outside by 7 a.m. on trash collection day and bring them back in by 7 p.m. the same day. Violators can receive “sticker” warning notices on their Toters and supposedly loss of trash collection service for repeat offenses.

The sanitary district gets complaints from neighborhood associations about Toter violations.

Picking up trash and recyclables in separate trucks would require adding some trucks to the district’s fleet.

One way to avoid that, said David LeBlanc, a Ball State University biology professor, would be to pick up trash one week and recyclables another week, like some Hoosier cities are doing.

LeBlanc, who was asked to volunteer to research the issue before the League of Women Voters forum, found that Fort Wayne, West Lafayette, Evansville, Terre Haute and Anderson are doing something similar to what is being discussed in Muncie.

Except that, instead of increasing the number of trucks to separately collect the trash and recyclables each week, those five cities have the same trucks collect both, but they “come around one week for recyclables and another week for trash,” LeBlanc said. That maintains the same number of trucks and keeps down emissions.

“This means, if we went this way, we’d have to hold our trash for two weeks and our recyclables for two weeks,” LeBlanc said. But if people are recycling and even composting, “for most of us that would not be a big issue.”

Either doing it the way those five cities do it or the way Donati discussed doing it “would still be an improvement,” LeBlanc went on. “It’s just a matter of what people are willing to accept.”

Toters get out of control in student rental neighborhoods. Photo by Seth Slabaugh

Donati envisions “a public health disaster” involving “larvae and maggots” and tipped-over Toters and “trash blowing everywhere” if Muncie were to pick up trash every two weeks.

But he added, “Everything is on the table right now … We are open to anything if you have research information.”

Sanitary district staff has visited other cities, conducted research and formed a recycling advisory committee. A proposal has not yet been presented to the four-member sanitary district board.

For now, submit comments to Jason Donati at jdonati@msdeng.com or 765 213-6450.