By mid-January, St. Paul residents and off-campus Tommies had woken up to big blue recycling bins on the doorsteps of their houses all over St. Paul as part of a new recycling initiative hosted by the city.
“It literally just showed up in our alley one day,” senior Kathryn Larson said. “It just had a huge piece of tape that said, ‘Start using this Jan. 16,’ so that’s when we started using it.”
Inside the bins, however, are more than cans and cardboard. Built into the plastic, wheeled bins are Radio Frequency Identification tracker chips, which the city uses to maintain inventory of the carts. RFID chips have been in use by recycling companies for a decade, but are a new addition to St. Paul carts.
“It’s not very much different from when you go to the grocery store and you’re checking out, and they wave your food in front of the little beam to get information on what you’re buying and how much it costs,” said Chris Goodwyn, Eureka Recycling spokesman.
RFID chips are a standard for recycling carts, but the main technology Eureka uses includes GPS coordinates.
“When the carts were placed, they were scanned with a geolocator,” Goodwyn said. “So basically the GPS coordinates of that cart were recorded. We know that whenever we go to those coordinates and tip a cart, that means that house is participating or not, or we missed that street because nobody’s carts got collected. Now we know to go back and get them.”
Eureka Recycling, St. Paul’s recycling provider, is using new technology to combat issues like uncollected recycling and hopes the bin will make recycling easier for residents.
The rollout of the new bins has mostly gone smoothly, but some students have encountered issues. The new bins were supposed to start being used on Jan. 16 but Larson’s recycling went uncollected until Feb. 6.
Other changes to the program include a new style of bin, new pickup placement, and for many St. Paul residents, a new recycling pickup day. The new, larger bins have both wheels and a lid, and residents now must place them in their alley or on the curb. The previous bins were short rectangular bins without a lid, which residents placed on their front curb every Thursday for pickup.
The new style of the bins is appreciated by some residents such as junior Maggie Becker.
“Last year, we just had these two blue bins with no top,” Becker said. “But with those, our recycling would get blown if it was really windy, and then we’d have to go out there and pick up our recycling and put it back in the bin before they picked it up.”
Solveig Rennan can be reached at ren6664@stthomas.edu