That time my town's recycling pickup just stopped coming

Last August in my neighborhood in Raleigh, the city quietly stopped collecting our recycling bins for three weeks straight without any notice. I ended up cramming cans and bottles into my trunk and driving them to a drop-off center 8 miles away because the smell was getting unbearable. Has anyone else had their local recycling service just vanish on them like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

king.robin29d ago

Honestly, is driving 8 miles to a drop-off that big of a deal? Sounds like a mild inconvenience, not a crisis.

dixon.iris29d ago

Hang on, let me play the other side here. Driving 8 miles can be a real pain if you don't have a car or if gas is already stretching your budget thin. What about people who work double shifts and barely have time to breathe, let alone add a 16-mile round trip errand to their day? Not everyone has a flexible schedule or a reliable vehicle just sitting there ready to go. It's easy to say it's no big deal when your own life isn't the one getting messed up by it.

ryantorres29d ago

I mean, I get what you're saying about people having tough schedules and not having a car handy, but the real issue here is that the city just ghosted us on recycling pickup for three weeks without a word. That's not a minor hiccup, that's a failure of a basic service we're all paying for through taxes or fees. If someone can't drive to a drop-off, they're stuck piling up trash and hoping it doesn't attract rodents or bugs, which is gross and unhealthy. So yeah, driving 8 miles was a pain for me too, but I had a car and could swing it. The bigger problem is that the system broke without warning, and that's what folks should be mad about, not whether one person's solution works for everybody.