Recycling bins being misused

In addition to household garbage, people have placed an iron pipe and a commode in the bin, Bryant told the city council.

Neither location is manned; both are available to the public without supervision 24 hours a day.

Trepagnier points out that the bins at Lanier Tech can accept newsprint, magazines and office paper, but recently they’ve been filled with cardboard.

“Barrow Medical Center in Winder had boxes in there,” Trepagnier noted. “I am carrying some to Barrow Medical Center to see where they’re coming from. I can’t figure why in the world they would have boxes in the Commerce bin.”

There were also numerous boxes from Domino’s Pizza, Trepagnier said, but the store manager put them there thinking they could be recycled with the paper and was horrified to find he’d helped create a problem.
Aside from the recent influx of cardboard, Trepagnier said the South Elm Street bins have been well received.

“Those newspaper-magazine-copy paper bins are doing great,” she said. “People are using them right and left.”

But because of the cardboard, the bins could not hold all the other paper, so when winds came up recently, the area was littered with paper from the bins.

The Waterworks Road bin is provided at no charge to the city by Waste Management, the city’s garbage hauler. According to Bryant, it’s filling up weekly.