Mosquitoes and Princeton's Outdated Recycling Containers

There must be defenders of Princeton's yellow and green recycling buckets, which have served long and fairly well, but it's easy to draw up a list of their drawbacks, when compared to the rollout bins that are standard equipment in most recycling programs.

• Lacking wheels, these buckets can pose a challenge for the elderly, or for most anyone who is less than musclebound, to carry out to the street.
• Lacking lids, they leave the contents exposed to rain and snow, which makes the paper heavier to haul and harder to sort at the recycling plant.
• Since many Princetonians store the buckets outside, rain also accumulates in tin cans and other recyclable containers, providing breeding grounds for the asian tiger mosquitoes that need very little water to breed, bite during the day (native mosquitoes are active at night), and have been moving north into New Jersey. 
• Being round, the buckets get blown over on windy days and roll into the street, spilling their contents and blocking traffic.
• Wind can also blow paper and plastic bottles out of overfilled buckets. Any loose bottles end up going down stormdrains and into local waterways, eventually contributing to plastic pollution in the oceans.
• The original rationale for separate yellow and green bins is no longer relevant with single-stream recycling. 
• Lacking attachments for mechanical emptying, the buckets must be lifted manually, potentially leading to increased worker back injury over time. 

The potential for back injury may be reduced now that there's less paper and glass. (May as well look on the bright side of the status quo, since change comes so slowly.) Riding my bike on Wiggins one day, I saw an elderly woman struggling to retrieve her buckets from the curb. She politely refused help, saying she had worked out a system to manage. Coping with minor and less minor annoyances is what we all do, and likely will continue to do for years to come.