The good news is that more residents are making the effort to recycle.  The bad news is that it's not always the right things!  You can see the problem in this image of the recycling room -- plastic bags, aluminum baking pans, dirty pizza boxes, greeting cards ... thrown on top of good recycling.  All of that is garbage and actually contaminates the recycling.  The posters tell you what you need to know, but below are some instructions so you can sort trash from recycling before you head down to 2P. 

We're not forcing anyone to recycle (although it's a really good thing to do!), so if it's too much trouble to rinse out your jars or bottles, or take the caps off before recycling, just put all your waste down the garbage chute. The staff doesn't have time (nor should they have to) sort through a mess like this to separate out what can actually be recycled. If we tried to recycle it all as is, we would be fined by our recycling company.  

In the future we would like to expand the recycling room to accept more types of materials (e.g. plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, etc.) but if we can't even get paper, metal, plastic and glass right without contamination then we'll have to close the recycling room or restrict access.  If everyone does their part, and puts recycling in the recycling and trash in the trash, we can continue to make recycling available to all 24/7!

For anyone who wants to make the effort to recycle materials beyond those which we currently are able to accept, Recycle This Pittsburgh is a great website that shows you how!

To those of you who do take the time to clean/sort/recycle, thank you on behalf of the PLANET!