Daily Herald opinion: Reducing doubts about recycling: Effort in Lake County provides some direction for dealing with disruptive complications

In the halcyon early days of widespread community recycling programs, residents often were encouraged to toss nearly anything made of paper, cardboard or plastic into the bin and watch their weekly trash output steadily decline.

It was a wonderful, hopeful time, attracting near universal public support and suggesting important advances in the battle for controlling our garbage and protecting the environment.

But over the years, reality has dimmed some of those initial expectations. Now, even many glass products, cans and plastic foam and cardboard food containers specifically marked for recycling have been declared too contaminated to recycle effectively, leaving consumers facing a bewildering and growing array of rules about what to recycle and how to prepare it.

The new recycling mantra? When in doubt, throw it out.

Enter orange bags.

As our Mick Zawislak reported last week, Solid Waste Agency of Lake County has embarked on a new partnership with Lakeshore Recycling Systems and Lake Forest-based Reynolds Consumer Products to help assure that recyclable materials aren’t dismissed simply because they present complications for the system.

The program will help keep chip bags, egg cartons, takeout containers, plastic utensils and even plastic bags, bubble wrap and more out of landfills.

Its signature feature is an orange bag sold under the Hefty Renew brand, a product of Reynolds Consumer Products. Users place those “when in doubt” materials into the bag, on which are printed the acceptable items, then tie it off and drop it in their bin alongside the rest of their loose recyclables. SWALCO says the orange bag helps keep the questionable items separate from the others, enabling handlers to manage them more effectively.

It’s an intriguing innovation, but not without its own drawbacks. Chief among them is that recycling businesses have to be set up specially to handle the orange bags, so currently only about 14 municipalities that have contracts with Lakeshore Recycling Systems are eligible.

But that’s a start. And, the long-term potential can revive some of the excitement that marked recycling’s earliest days. Reynolds says that more than 2,800 tons of hard-to-recycle materials have been diverted from landfills in six states since it began operating the program in 2018. Walter Willis, SWALCO’s executive director, told Zawislak the program could help divert 750,000 tons of waste a year from the nation’s landfills.

It’s encouraging to see an organization like SWALCO working with locally based companies to assertively deal with complications that hold back recycling programs from the success they could have, that indeed we need them to have. Hopefully, these agencies and others like them throughout the suburbs will join in to help build on their example.