Curbside garbage pickup is at the heart of Sheboygan’s effort to keep our city and neighborhoods clean and safe for the benefit of all residents. The city has been receiving complaints about garbage being left on the curb by residents a day or two before garbage pickup. This practice creates a problem as birds will make quite a mess of the garbage and additional work for the Sanitation Department staff. By City ordinance resident may only put their garbage out on the curb for pickup after 5:00 p.m. on the day prior to their assigned day for curbside garbage pickup.
I encourage residents that are not at home on their garbage pickup day to ask neighbors for assistance to comply with the timing for putting their garbage on the curb for pickup. If you cannot get assistance from someone to place the garbage out for collection at the proper time, please just keep it in your garage or a proper receptacle until the next week’s scheduled pickup day. When garbage is placed at the curb at a time that is earlier than allowed the garbage is tagged. The residents of tagged homes are contacted by the Sanitation Department, and if there is a second occurrence the Police Department will issue a citation. In the North Flats Neighborhood, association members have volunteered to assist the city in the enforcement of this ordinance.
In February of 2015, the City of Sheboygan began a City Resident Curbside Recycling Education program. Since the program started, the percent of garbage recycled has risen as much as 7.8 % from 26.8 % in January to 34.6 % in October 2015. Since that high number in October the recycling has gradually dropped down to a disappointing level of 24.7 % of garbage recycled for the month of April 2016.
The education program included a media campaign, a recycling brochure was created and distributed to 17,000 residents with their water bills and shared with the Landlord Association for additional distribution. The Sheboygan Sustainable Taskforce committee has developed an Elementary School program and is bringing it to the Sheboygan Elementary School classes.
In the past, for over a decade we asked residents to put only glass bottles, aluminum and tin cans and plastic containers in their blue bag one week and Paper products out the next week. But for the past 6 years the city has switched to single stream recycling. We now ask that residents put all the recyclable items into the blue recycling bag and put it out every week. Additional items that should be in the blue recycling bag are newspapers, magazines, discarded mailings, all cardboard, all paper Items. A printable copy of the Sheboygan’s Recycling brochure can be found on the City website.
There were 435.3 more tons of garbage recycled in 2015 than the previous year. The increase in recycling will save the City an estimated $14,386 in tipping fees. Recycling has increased and on average we are recycling 29.5 % of all curbside garbage. Further effort is needed to reach our goal to recycle 40% of our curbside garbage.
The average person in Wisconsin generates 4.7 pounds of trash each day and recycles 1.9 pounds of that trash per day. In the City of Sheboygan we only recycle about 1.45 pounds of trash per person, per day. We are moving in the right direction, but we will need the participation of all residents to meet or beat the state average for recycling.
As mayor, I appreciate and thank our residents who have participated by recycling their garbage properly and ask that everyone join the effort so that the City of Sheboygan can meet their goal to recycle 40% or more of residential garbage.
