Dysfunctional Recycling Containers--Part One

(Note, 11/09: Since this post was published, the library has improved its recycling containers.)

They say you can't judge a book by its cover. This recycling container looks perfectly sensible, clearly labeled as to what should be thrown into it. But in practice it fails miserably at its intended use, and has been doing so ever since the Princeton Public Library's cafe opened several years ago.

A functional recycling container would 1) provide abundant visual cues to the user, and 2) be paired with a trash container. The absence of either of these attributes almost always insures the "recycling" container will get filled with trash.

Designers of buildings and plazas typically choose aesthetics over functionality, which often means the trash and recycling containers are both expensive (as much as $1000 each) and stylishly similar in appearance. The library cafe's recycling container fails because it is placed far from the trash container and looks just like it (2nd photo). Though the container is labeled, no one stops to read labels, and the container's wide mouth is an invitation for trash.

Here you have a high profile public building in a progressive town, no doubt run by people with environmental sympathies, and everything but cardboard is being thrown in the trash dumpster out back.

You'd expect institutions like schools and libraries to use recycling as a way to educate children to be good environmental stewards, but my experience has been the opposite. Far from being unusual, this "recycling in name only" is more the rule than the exception in public places, institutions and businesses.

Only an extremely persistent volunteer effort was sufficient to get recycling up to speed in Princeton's public schools last year. This fall, multiple emails over several months to the library have at last yielded a recognition by the library's management of this and other recycling problems in the building. Princeton township and borough have mandatory recycling ordinances, but these by themselves do not make recycling happen.

In the plaza outside the library are some more gleaming containers, sometimes paired. The openings are at least different--for those that still have tops--but there's a good chance that people don't distinguish, and that all contents get carted off to the landfill.