Mayor Marcia Leclerc Encourages You To Recycle Properly
East Hartford, CT— East Hartford Mayor Marcia Leclerc encourages residents to commit to being better stewards of the environment and help improve the quality of the Town’s sustainability efforts through proper recycling.
Recently, the East Hartford Public Works Department has identified a growing contamination problem in residential recycling carts, which occurs when unacceptable materials are deposited into recycling bins. This leads to the contamination of the entire truckload, making it unrecyclable and results in the Town paying extra fees to dispose of the contaminated recyclables as regular municipal solid waste.
To prevent contamination of recyclables, Mayor Leclerc, the Town of East Hartford and the East Hartford Public Works Department encourage residents to take a more careful approach at what they put in their recycling carts. As a reminder, the list of unacceptable items that contaminate recycling includes:
Regular household trash: The green carts provided to households 1-6 family are for regular household trash. The blue recycling cart should not contain any regular trash.
Dangerous or toxic or hazardous items: Motor oil, electronics, antifreeze, paint cans can be delivered to the transfer station for FREE. Needles/sharps must be placed in milk jugs, tightly taped and tossed in the regular trash.
Large items: Toys of any kind, laundry baskets, plastic storage containers, 5 gallon buckets all go into the regular trash.
Bulky waste: No furniture, no rugs, appliances, recreational equipment, household kitchen items are to be placed in the blue cart. East Hartford is proud to have a comprehensive bulky waste collection program, allowing residents to make appointments for curbside collection and allows self-delivery to the transfer station. Please visit www.easthartfordct.gov/public-works for details about the Town’s bulky waste process.
Items that tangle: Plastic bags, including bubble wrap and other plastic wrap, garden hoses, strings of holiday lights, twine all tangle the sorting equipment and shut down the conveyer belts at the recycling center. Clean and dry plastic bags and wrap are accepted at grocery and In addition, please do not use plastic bags to collect recyclables, just place them loose in the blue cart.
Leaves or yard debris: Organic materials never belong in the recycling cart. Leaves can be delivered to the transfer station in brown bags for FREE and while a bulky permit is required for delivery of other types of yard debris.
Clothing or textiles: Although the curbside pink bag program is no longer available to East Hartford residents, these materials can be deposited in textile recycling boxes available for FREE recycling 24/7 at Public Works, 1 Ecology Drive, just outside the gate and at the Transfer Station.
Styrofoam: Residents should separate Styrofoam from cardboard packaging. Styrofoam goes in the trash green cart and the cardboard box, flattened or cut, goes in the blue cart. In addition, all recyclables should be properly rinsed and clean with no food contents.
Please help us keep contaminants out of the blue recycling carts to ensure the Town can continue to recycle at a considerably lower cost than disposing of the same materials with the municipal solid waste stream and reach its recycling diversion goals. For additional information on proper recycling please see this link https://www.easthartfordct.gov/waste-services/pages/recycling. View this brochure for further details.