Baltimore County's curbside recycling effort, slow to get started, is now more than half complete, despite an unsettled market for recyclable goods.
Some 28,000 households in neighborhoods such as Greater Rosedale and Stoneleigh/Wiltondale began curbside recycling in November -- the largest monthly expansion in the county's 3-year-old recycling program.
So far, 84,000 of the county's 200,000 single-family homes get curbside recycling service in a variety of forms as the county works to develop a model for its final effort. Its goal is to have 155,000 homes recycling trash by Jan. 1, 1994.
The county lags far behind Baltimore City, which has full curbside recycling. But officials argue -- and some recycling advocates agree -- that jumping into a full program makes little sense until stable markets develop for the county's recyclable waste.
The county already has exceeded its state mandate to recycle 20 percent of its waste by the 1994 deadline, said Charles M. Reighart, the recycling manager.
From January through June of this year, the county generated 414,651 tons of trash and recycled 69,536 tons.
"Our recycling story is relatively unsung, but our effort is working and working well," Mr. Reighart said, "and we will make progress in this area in the future. There is still room for improvement, and we are working in that direction."
The county now serves communities as broad as Greater Hereford, where 1,188 households scattered over 24 square miles receive mixed-paper pickup every third week, and as small as Campus Hills in Towson, where 375 households in less than one-quarter of a square mile have mixed paper, grass and leaves, and bottles and cans picked up on a weekly rotating basis.
So far only two neighborhoods, Campus Hills and Overlea-Linover, have recycling pickups for all three types of trash.
"Campus Hills was an area that expressed an intense interest in recycling, and because of its compact size, we felt it was a good candidate for the full range of recycling pickup," said Mr. Reighart.
Overlea-Linover started as a curbside recycling pilot project in November 1990, and that service continues.
A dramatic change
Recycling has dramatically changed the way Kathy Fernandez and her husband, Jorge, look at trash. Before recycling came to their Overlea area neighborhood, they routinely set out three bags of mixed trash a week.
