NBC4 Safe & Secure Community Shred in Gaithersburg - June 28, 2008

The next NBC4 Safe & Secure Community Shred event comes to us! It will be held at the Montgomery County Agricultural Center in Gaithersburg.

This free event will accept up to 5 boxes of your personal papers -- no business or commercial items, please. Details about accepted material and the Community Shred program

Saturday, June 28, 2008
Event hours: 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.

Montgomery County Agricultural Center
16 Chestnut St.
Gaithersburg, MD 20877
Map of the Agricultural Center
Text with driving and public transit directions

Recycling Awareness Week - awards given for special achievement

At yesterday's Recycling Achievement Awards Recognition Program, we celebrated recycling efforts in these categories:

• Outstanding Recycling Volunteers
• Multi-Family Property Excellence in Recycling
• Multi-Family Property Outstanding Improvement in Recycling
• Multi-Family Property Outstanding Individual Achievement in Recycling
• Excellence in Recycling -- Business
• Outstanding Achievement in Recycling - Business
• Outstanding Achievement in Recycling - Individual

Congratulations to all for helping to promote recycling in Montgomery County!

Recycling Awareness Week - Poster content winners honored

On Tuesday evening, we announced and honored 32 student artists who received awards in our annual Montgomery County School Recycling Poster Contest. Congratulations!

This year’s poster contest theme was “Don’t Throw It Away, Recycle Every Day".

Update (5/28/2008): Look at the winning posters

Award ceremony attendees admiring contest entries

Memorial Day Holiday - modified schedule

Montgomery County-provided recycling and trash collections

Monday, May 26, 2008 - Memorial Day - is a recycling and trash collection holiday. After the holiday, all County-provided recycling and trash collections will be one day later than normal.

Detailed holiday schedule and information

If you have any questions or concerns about your County-provided collection, please contact our Customer Service staff online or call 240-777-6410.

Note: if you (or your community) have a private contract for your trash collection, these schedule announcements may not apply to your trash service -- check with your hauler or community manager.

Shady Grove Solid Waste Transfer Station

• Monday, May 26, 2008: closed
• Tuesday, May 27, 2008: will reopen with normal hours
• Transfer Station location, hours and other details
  

Damascus and Poolesville Beauty Spots

• Saturday and Sunday, May 24 and 25, 2008: closed
• Beauty Spot locations, hours and other details

Our "Behind the Scenes" citizens academy graduates Spring class

Our Spring 2008 "Behind the Scenes" course class graduated last Thursday! For six weeks, participants discussed a wide range of topics related to recycling, trash, and waste reduction in Montgomery County.

Participant comments included:

• [One of the most interesting things I learned was] that the non-recycled trash runs a power plant and that a train takes it there.
• Every class was so fascinating and I would have gladly paid tuition to take this program.
• Great end-to-end coverage of solid waste management.

"Behind the Scenes" course participants tour the Solid Waste Transfer Station

Preregister to learn about future "Behind the Scenes" sessions

Compost bins now available on weekends

Need a compost bin for your yard? We have a new pickup location which is open on weekends!

The Audubon Sanctary Shop is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays, and from Noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays, and offers our compost bins to you at no charge.

Audubon Sanctuary Shop
Woodend Nature Sanctuary
8940 Jones Mill Road
Chevy Chase, MD 20815
301-652-3606
bookshop@audubonnaturalist.org

Complete list of compost bin pickup locations

Why not have a bin for recycling plastic bags at the Transfer Station?

From our mailbag:

Too bad the recycling center can't accept them. Why not have an additional bin for them? Although stores like Whole Food are terminating them from their stores, unfortunately, those plastic bags are still a significant part of our surrounding.

We are constantly evaluating the range of materials we are able to accept in the recycling drop-off area at our Solid Waste Transfer Station. Just last month, we expanded our electronics recycling program to accept small electronics, in addition to the computers and televisions we were already taking.

At this time, we are unable to dedicate a collection container to plastic bags at the Transfer Station. Instead, we recommend that you take your plastic bags to recycling bins at your local grocery stores. Hopefully, having drop-off options close to home will make it even more convenient than bringing bags to us.

And, we encourage using reusable cloth bags whenever possible, which helps you avoid having plastic bags to recycle.

Thanks for celebrating Earth Day with us

What a warm and sunny day it was for our Earth Day Celebration! While the advance weather forecast included rain, those drops didn't fall until long after our event was over. (Whew!) Thank you to the hundreds of you who came out and joined us.

We are so grateful to our many event volunteers - a good number of whom were teens earning Student Service Learning hours - for your assistance throughout the day.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday - modified schedules

Montgomery County-provided recycling and trash collections

Monday, January 21, 2008 - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday - is a recycling and trash collection holiday. After the holiday, all County-provided recycling and trash collections will be one day later than normal during the week of January 21.

If you have any questions or concerns about your County-provided collection, please contact our Customer Service staff online or call 240-777-6410.

Note: if you (or your community) have a private contract for your trash collection, these schedule announcements may not apply to your trash service -- check with your hauler or community manager.

Shady Grove Transfer Station

• closed: Monday, January 21, 2008
• reopens: Tuesday, January 22, 2008
• Transfer Station hours and other details

From pretty Christmas trees to marvelous mulch

What happens to your Christmas tree after it is whisked away from your curb for recycling?

Yard trim trucks carrying leaves, grass, and brush -- and Christmas trees! -- enter the Solid Waste Transfer Station through its Truck Entrance.

After weighing in on the scales, the trucks head over to the Yard Trim area.

Look at that big pile of yard trim and trees! See those paper yard trim bags? They will be ground up right along with their contents.

Here is the grinder at work.

The pile of yard trim and trees is in the foreground of this photo; the resulting mulch pile is in the background. With the remainder of the autumn leaves, and now the Christmas trees, in the mix, January and February are excellent times to come and take home some of our mulch.

How do I dispose of an artificial Christmas tree?

A Happy New Year to all of you!

From a Live Help chat to us:

What is the prescribed way to dispose of an old artificle / fake metal Christmas tree? Thanks.

Actually, thank you for the opportunity to add to the information on our Christmas tree recycling web page.

Here is the information I have added to the Christmas tree page...

If you have Montgomery County-provided trash collection service

If you have Montgomery County-provided trash service, please request a bulk trash pickup for your artificial Christmas tree at www.montgomerycountymd.gov/bulktrash or 240-777-6410.

If you have privately-provided trash service

If you have privately-provided trash service because you or your homeowners' association have direct contract with a company, please check with your collection company for instructions.

If your artificial tree is still in usable condition

If your artificial Christmas tree is still in usable condition, consider offering it to a fellow community member on your local Freecycle Network group.

Beauty Spots closed December 29 + 30, 2007

The Damascus and Poolesville Beauty Spots will be closed this weekend, December 29 + 30, 2007. (This is a change from the previously announced schedule.)

Can I recycle most wrapping paper?

December 3, 2010: updated paper recycling information

From our mailbag:

Hello! Can I recycle most wrapping paper?

Thank you, D., for this question! The answer is yes.

Please add wrapping paper to your other paper recyclables. There are a few exceptions: if the paper is foil- or plastic-coated, please put it into the trash (or, reuse it, if it's still in good condition). Some wrapping "paper" is actually a thin plastic film; we cannot accept this for recycling either.

Most types of wrapping paper can be recycled along with your other types of recyclable mixed paper. There is an exception: foil wrapping paper, please put it into the trash (or, reuse it, if it's still in good condition). Some wrapping is actually not paper but a thin plastic film; we cannot accept this for recycling either.

What about ribbons and tape? Please remove the ribbons and other decorations from your wrapping paper before adding it to your paper collection. Bits of tape on the paper are fine -- you do not need to remove them.

Our Winter 2007 Recycletter is available

I have just posted the Winter 2007 Recycletter to our website. The Recycletter is published quarterly by our Recycling Volunteer Program.

Interested in joining the Recycling Volunteer Program? Mark your calendars now to save the date for one of these upcoming training sessions:

• Thursday, January 17, 2008, 6 pm to 9 pm
• Thursday, March 27, 2008, 6 pm to 9 pm
• Saturday, March 29, 2008 10 am to 1 pm

We invite all volunteer - new and current - to an advanced training session on Thursday, April 3, 2008, 6 pm to 8 pm.
For registration details, I'll purposely refer you to the Recycletter itself!

No plastics bags, please!

While a picture tells a thousand words, showing the actual item is even more effective!

Using plastic bags and putting them into recycling containers labeled for commingled materials (aluminum cans and foil products, bi-metal steel/tin cans, glass bottles and jars, and plastic narrow-neck bottles) and mixed paper and cardboard is a common error. (While plastic grocery bags are recyclable, they typically are not acceptable in multi-family or single-family residential recycling programs. However, most local grocery stores in Montgomery County accept plastic shopping bags for recycling, so take them with you the next time you go grocery shopping.)

The program specialists in our multi-family recycling program visit apartments and condominiums daily, checking their recycling programs and efforts, and providing assistance to residents and property managers.

On a recent visit to a property in Bethesda, a program specialist found a plastic bag, emphatically labeled with "No!", to remind residents that these bags should not go into their recycling containers. Kudos to the property managers for displaying our recycling do's and don'ts poster (seen on the left; available in English and Spanish versions), and for supplementing the poster's information with an actual example!

How may you recycle your Christmas tree?

Simply set it out at the curb for collection on your recycling day, starting next Wednesday. Our Christmas tree recycling program will run from Wednesday, December 26, 2007 through Friday, February 1, 2008 for this holiday season. Gone are the days when you need to pack your dry, needle-shedding tree into your car for transport to your closest collection point!

Please give us only your tree -- no lights, no decorations, no wires, no tree stand, and no plastic tree bag. Why? We grind up the trees to create mulch. Larger metal items like tree stands are problems because they can damage the grinding equipment and also become safety hazards. The decorations, plastics, and the like become contaminants in the finished mulch.

Keep reading our blog -- a future post will show you our Christmas tree operations. Unfortunately, what we can't offer you online is the wonderful pine fragrance which accompanies the Christmas tree mulch-making! For that, you'll have to come to the Solid Waste Transfer Station yourself!

Our Veggie Oil Exchange makes it to Grist's "Ask Umbra" column

From our mailbag:

I don't know if you are familiar with this on-line advice column, but it is a feature of Grist. Recently your MoCo website got a mention!

I appreciate your note, M. Sure enough! In her December 3, 2007, Ask Umbra column about uses for old cooking oil, Grist's Umbra Fisk wrote:

"I also had a little luck on Craigslist and a surprising result when I put "donate used vegetable oil" into my search engine: the solid waste department for Montgomery County, Md., has an entire veggie oil exchange listing on their website. Zounds."

Thanks for finding us, Umbra, and for sharing the word about our Vegetable Oil Exchange with your readers!

How do I recycle toy boxes?

From our mailbag:

[The holiday reminder emails are] a great service. I just would like to suggest that next December you advise your subscribers on how to dispose of the cardboard/plastic boxes that many toys come wrapped in. This year, for example, I separated the paper and the plastic parts and put them out separately for recycling. Was this correct?

Thank you, TS, for your compliment about our holiday reminder email service, and for your question. Since it's December again, it's time to pull it out of the file in which I've been safely storing it.

Thank you also for correctly preparing the toy packaging in your household for recycling. To you Gentle Readers in similar situations this holiday season (or at any time), please:

• Pull out plastic bags, plastic ties, foam packing, desiccant packets, and other non-paper items from the box. Dispose of these plastic items (except for the bags) in your regular household trash; you can add the bags to the plastic bag collection at your local grocery store. What about plastic "windows" in toy boxes? You may leave these on the box when you give it to us for recycling.
  
• Put the empty cardboard boxes together with your other paper recyclables, for pickup on your recycling day.

Christmas Day and New Year's Day Holidays - modified schedules

Montgomery County-provided recycling and trash collections

Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - Christmas Day - is a recycling and trash collection holiday. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday collections will shift by one day.

Tuesday, January 1 - New Year's Day - is a also recycling and trash collection holiday. Again, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday collections will shift by one day.

Detailed holiday schedule and information

If you have any questions or concerns about your County-provided collection, please contact our Customer Service staff online or call 240-777-6410.

Note: if you (or your community) have a private contract for your trash collection, these schedule announcements may not apply to your trash service -- check with your hauler or community manager.

Shady Grove Transfer Station

Transfer Station hours and other details

Christmas Day Holiday:

• Monday, December 24, 2007: will close at 5:00 p.m.
• Tuesday, December 25, 2007: closed
• Wednesday, December 26, 2007: will reopen with normal hours

New Year's Day Holiday:

• Monday, December 31, 2007: will close at 5:00 p.m.
• Tuesday, January 1, 2008: closed
• Wednesday, January 2, 2008: will reopen with normal hours

When will my leaves be picked up?

From our mailbag:

I live at [address removed] and still have not seen a [leaf] collection.

We in the Division of Solid Waste Services provide the weekly curbside yard trim collection; the leaf vacuuming is done by our sister agency, the Highway Operations Section.

Our colleagues in Highway Operations are posting leaf collection updates to their website to keep residents up-to-date about crews' progress.

In neighborhoods receiving leaf vacuuming, crews post signs a few days in advance of each leaf collection. Crews do their best to meet their planned schedules. However, Mother Nature can and does pose challenges to them. For example, yesterday's snow meant that some of the leafing equipment was put on "snow duty." And, when that snow melts, the wet leaves will be more difficult to vacuum than dry leaves.