Conversations with Jessica who works for the City of Tucson

This post is part of the Real Diaper Facts carnival hosted by Real Diaper Events, the official blog of the Real Diaper Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to cloth diaper education. Participants were asked to write about diaper lies and real diaper facts. See the list at the bottom of this post to read the rest of the carnival entries.


I was at a good bye lunch for my bff Alana last week,(that's us),where I met this dynamic woman named Jessica, who has been friends with Alana since grade school.

Jessica works for the City of Tucson and I believe she works in the recycling department, but I might be mistaken. We got to talking, as women do, and I was telling her all about LolliDoo® . She doesn't have kids yet but she was extremely excited and supportive of us.

Then she told me about her work and this is what the intention of this blog entry is about. Jessica mentioned some important things about recycling that I never considered.

1. People throw non recyclable bags in the recycle bin (ie. grocery and trash bags)
2. I was astounded by this one, people also throw disposable diapers in the recycle bin.

What happens when either plastic bags or diapers are thrown in the recycle bin was news to me. First of all it contaminates the entire load, not just the load from the one house, but everything that was collected in the truck that day. Apparently if it cannot be filtered, like say cottage cheese, then it cannot be recycled.

So what happens, is that one well meaning person throws a trash bag full of recycles in the recycle bin. Then it contaminates the load. So, it winds up wasting gas, money and the entire load of would be recyclable material now has to be dumped into the landfill.

When disposable diapers are thrown into the recycle bin the same thing happens. As with throwing disposable diapers in the regular trash, there are the leaching issues and health hazards. Even though it is illegal to throw human feces in the landfill, most parents disregard this law and as a result, the rest of us have to deal with groundwater contamination and the general nastiness of something filled with urine and feces stinking up our landfills for 500+ years.

But I digress.

The point is that we, myself included, really need to pay attention to what we toss into the recycle bin so that we can in fact, recycle and not waste the taxpayers money and our resources on wasteful missions.

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view the entire list of entered links…