recycled thoughts in sagamore hills

Recycling Cardboard

In northeastern Ohio, cardboard is materiala non grata in most communities. Those with weekly curbside (like Cuyahoga Falls) pickup restrict materials to newspapers and a bin of glass/tin/plastic. Sagamore Hills has a centralized recycling center: two rusty trailers in the parking lot of the city building; they take everything except cardboard, and pick up on Thursdays.

At the beginning of the summer, I decided that our family should save our cardboard anyway, and find someplace to recycle it. I know someone does it locally, because the grocery stored have pallets of broken-down, banded cardboard behind their buildings. Those pallets get picked up by someone, right? Anyway, after a month of saving up our corrugated cardboard in the garage, we had enough for a recycling trip. I looked on the internet to find recyclers that take cardboard in Summit County. Nada. I looked at the Cuyahoga County list, wrote down the addresses of several recycling centers, and we loaded up the Jeep. Well, the first four centers we tried had big signs, NO CARDBOARD, despite what it said on the website... after an hour of aimless driving that Sunday morning, dh pulled behind a grocery store and we hid our recyclables among their lovely pallets of cardboard. (Guilt! Guilt!) Then we drove on, past the legendary West Side Market, a place I love but visit infrequently because of the distance...

Lo and behold, there are public recycling bins in the WSM parking lot, with big signs, CARDBOARD ONLY -- PLEASE BREAK DOWN BOXES! It makes sense that since the market would produce tons of corrugated cardboard each week, it would need its own pickup! So, next time you have a Jeep-full of cardboard to recycle, drive up to WSM on a Saturday, visit those lovely, guilt-free recycling bins, then go inside to check out the organic produce at Basketeria!

Labels: Basketeria, organic food, recycling, West Side Market

posted by nikitee @ 7:30 AM