WDBJ7 News
ROANOKE, Va. - If you live in the City of Roanoke, you’re about to become familiar with a new term: single stream.
Beginning this summer, the city will start phasing in a new recycling system.
Through a contract with a local recycling company, the city will get 35,000 new, 96-gallon trash cans that they’ll distribute to residents.
Right now, people who live in the City of Roanoke have to sort recycling on their own.
Single stream means all recycling; plastic, aluminum, glass and paper will go into that one trash can.
The plan now is for the city to collect that recycling every other week.
The hope is to have everything up and running by the first week of October.
City officials say this will save the city money in the long term. It’s good for the environment and it’s easy for you at home.
“Single stream recycling is going to make it much, much easier for our customers to recycle,” Roanoke City Solid Waste Manager
Skip Decker said. “No more sorting. They are going to put everything into one bin and it makes it much, much easier. And they are going to realize the more they recycle, the less trash they’ll have.”
Decker says this program won’t necessarily make the city money, but it’ll definitely save some.
Right now, it costs Roanoke $49 a ton to recycle trash, and almost $15 less than that for a ton of recycling.
The more people recycle, the more the city saves.
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