Public recycling bins set to debut

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Sandpoint City Councilor Pam Duquette is preparing to roll out a pilot project providing a dozen recycling bins to locations ranging from City Beach to the downtown core, Farmin Park and the James E. Russell Sports Center — as well as other city-owned properties where people frequent.

The new recycling program is being personally led by Duquette, who secured the $10,000 in funding from the city to fabricate the bins, which are blue-painted metal, hold a 30-gallon container, and bear signage directing users what they can and can’t dispose of.

The Kalispel Tribe built the bins, which are owned by the city, but Duquette and a group of other volunteers will check and empty the receptacles, sort their contents, and ensure they make it into the recycling stream.

Councilor Pam Duquette hopes to have new city recycling cans placed sometime in the week of April 28. Courtesy photo

Duquette told the Reader that she hopes to have the bins in place sometime in the week of Monday, April 28, and had the idea for the project based on her time spent working as a teacher in Ketchum, where there are public recycling bins throughout the city. 

“It’s always something that’s been a thorn in my side — c’mon, it’s not that hard,” she said.

As it is, the only opportunities for disposing of recyclables are in private settings — “We pick up a beer can downtown, we’d have to walk home and put it in the recycle bin,” Duquette said.

She hopes that the new bins will help meet that missing link in the city’s waste collection system, and serve as an opportunity to educate the public on recycling in general.

Duquette said she met with downtown businesses to ask whether they recycled, to which most told her they don’t bother because all that material will end up in a landfill anyway.

“That’s not true,” she said, adding that she followed the recycling process to Waste Management’s facility in Airway Heights, Wash., where Sandpoint’s cast-off material is indeed recycled — but not all of it.

“They can recycle only cardboard, paper, aluminum and tin, and plastic — but only plastic that holds liquid, like if it has a screw-top,” Duquette said. “No plastic cups, no glass bottles right now. The problem being, they have no market. Until the landfill in Airway Heights can find a market for those things, they can’t recycle them.”

Sandpoint’s new public recycling bins will be marked with stickers limiting them to aluminum cans and plastic bottles — not coffee cups or household waste, such as empty soap bottles — and will have small circular openings in the hope of keeping users from discarding materials that have been contaminated by food. 

 “That’s what ruins it for everybody,” she said. “Waste Management takes it in the truck, and then they dump it in their clean area and find all this stuff and they have to scrap the whole thing.”

Duquette said Panhandle Special Needs, Inc. will take the aluminum collected from the bins and bring it to Pacific Steel and Recycling for profit. Plastic bottles will be dropped off at a prearranged location and delivered to Colburn Transfer Station for recycling.

“I just think it’s a win-win if people put the right things in there,” Duquette said.