Credit: Creative Commons

Starting Monday, Feb. 1, 2021, glass will no longer be accepted in blue bins, and will instead be collected at drop-off sites across the city.

According to Tucson’s Environmental and General Services Department, removing glass from curbside collection will reduce processing costs at the Materials Recovery Facility. The community drop-off sites are planned to keep glass reuse local and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This change is part of the City’s Climate Action Plan, and comes after a 30,000-house recycling audit conducted by EGSD.

Drop-off sites will be opening in February, and more information will be mailed to all EGSD customers in January. Glass dropped off should be empty, clean, and dry, with lids and caps removed. There is no need to remove the labels.

Starting Feb. 21, 2021, here is what will be accepted in the blue barrel program: 

  • Plastic bottles, jugs, and containers
  • Paper 
  • Cardboard
  • Aluminum/tin cans

This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2020.

8 replies on “Mayor and Council Vote to Remove Glass from Curbside Recycling”

  4. Recycling is hard work and no one is going to become as rich as Zuckerburg doing it. It is beyond the capacity of our species to care of ourselves in this way.

  5. When asked if they support conservation or consider themselves conservationists, a consistently strong majority of people polled (like usually around 70 percent) say “yes”.

    When asked “What do you do that supports conservation/demonstrates that you are a conservationist?”, they often are at a loss for words, and the best thing they can come up with is a pathetic “Well, I recycle.” Studies show that they only do that consistently when they can dump it all into one bin a few feet from their door.

    Now, our pathetic, foolish, greedy, capitalist society can’t even do recycling right. The amount of glass that gets recycled will totally crash if you force people to drive somewhere to drop it off (and, uhm, how the heck does thousands of people driving around individually with their glass vs. a centralized collection system with relatively few trucks picking up everybody’s glass cut greenhouse gas emissions???). This minimal baby step of conservation is going ass-backward, decades after becoming the one tiny thing that most people do to take responsibility for the inconceivable volume of trash and environmental harm that our incredibly wasteful and destructive capitalist system creates.

    Why is recycling failing? Because it’s ruled by the concept of profit, just like everything else in the madness of capitalism. If ain’t profitable, well then sorry, we can’t be f*cked to do it, no matter how important or beneficial or necessary it may be to society as a whole. Such fundamental, self-defeating idiocy and irresponsibility is baked into the system. The tyranny of profit literally cancels common sense and the common good.

    Surely this abject failure is the 4th sign of the apocapitalypse.

  6. We run our government with no eye towards profit. That being said the only way it can offer more is to take more. Take income, take inheritance and take retirement from it’s citizens.

    Maybe they are trying to do things they shouldn’t be doing. I keep hearing the mantra “follow the science” but as we now know “science ain’t free.”

    Should hospitals also be relieved of a profit motive?

    Venezuela is still warm in the winter. I don’t want Venezuela here. Neither would working Americans if they would stop to think it through.

  7. I am a Green democratic socialist. I care DEEPLY for our environment. Someone needs to explain how the hell a milion people driving extra miles several times every single month is better for our emissions than continuing to use the same trucks that ALREADY pick up our paper/plastic/metal. Also, You are forcing ALL of us to spend extra gas and time to make an insubstantial saving for a facility that should be subsidized by our government taxes anyway. THIS IS THE SINGLE WORST DECISION THAT TUCSON HAS MADE DURING MY 15 YEARS OF LIVING HERE. It needs to be immediately reversed.

  8. It really shouldn’t matter what color your are. We are all one. Why not put up signs in your yard (GLASS DROPOFF) and let everybody drop off their glass recyclables in your yard so you can wash them out and sell them to the company that has been buying them? Citizens Have Solutions. That’s what I call what I do.

    When the Penny Man ran for Mayor he suggested that if you have a pothole on your road, get a bag of concrete and fill it. Look how much better our roads are because people listened to him.

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