Maybe congratulations to Bellingham, too. We recycle a lot and even have a once a month pick-up option for garbage, as some of us recycle/compost enough that we don't come close to filling the can even monthly.

i always see bellingham as a neighborhood of seattle.

Ahem.

What Beth said. Seriously. Us Bellinghamsters banned plastic bags, recycle like mad and win crazy awards for our green building projects.

Republicans HATE recycling. They buy extra things at stores SPECIFICALLY to THROW AWAY the packaging material in the GARBAGE.

On the other hand, we can specifically NOT thank Pullman/WSU. They don't recycle.

once-a-month garbage makes so much more sense. we still have once-a-week and it's maddening! the recycling fills up SO much faster than the garbage, and recycling is every other week!

With the help of worm composting, a busy North Carolina airport reduces trash by 70 percent:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/12…

Recycling is better than not recycling, but it is only the first step. We went from completely insane waste to possibly moderate but still unsustainable waste.

Remember: I could go grab a stack of newspapers (The Stranger, perhaps), throw them in my recycling bin and increase my recycling to trash ratio.

We shouldn't congratulate ourselves that we have a higher recycling rate than the slobs in Pullman. Seattle's overall consumption rate is still orders of magnitude unsustainable. We can use less, use it smarter, think more long-term and still have a high quality of life. We've won the recycling battle, time to move on to the next thing.

If you think of Bellingham as a neighborhood of Seattle, then I sincerely doubt you have spent any real time in Bellingham.

interesting comment charles. while i do agree that seattle and like minded west-o-the-cascades towns (olympia, bellingham, etc.) probably bear the lions share of tipping statewide recycling rates to where they are now, i really don't think us v. them comments help in these situations. i just changed careers after spending the past 5 years in the recycling/waste management realm in seattle but worked with plenty of solid waste program managers/haulers/regulators from the east side of the state and can confidently say that many of them are doing a terrific job. seattle's had curbside recycling for almost 25 years now and we still can't quite reach our 60% diversion goal. at least in the us, recycling has always been a slow process and probably always will be (though i certainly don't hope that), and there is a lot of red tape for X community to overcome and infrastructure to get put in place in order for recycling to be as easy & comprehensive it is for many of us on the westside. seattle and other municipalities work closely with spokane, tri-cities, yakima, & others to help them implement successful, cutting edge programs. and in the grand scheme of things, those towns are doing far better than most other places in the US. so, i guess the point of my rant is that the stranger consider a little more holistic and inclusive of an angle on this issue instead of a competitive, "we're the better recyclers and deserve the praise!" take. washington is all of our state, and despite significant political differences, we're working together across aisles to get a lot of amazing shit done (great recycling, gay marriage, pot legalization) and transcend status quos.

also, scruffyballardman is right on with the real issue at hand here.

It's sad that the comments are better than the post 9 times out of 10 on the Stranger

@3 ftw.

@11, completely agree with you. seattle should be doing much more. much, much more.

13, i can't see why that is sad or bad news. do you go to a party for the host or the people at the party?

@7

Maddening is exactly the right word. It's worse than Hitler times the black death.

BTW, FWIW, Spokane just got a real recycling program in October: most any kind of paper, any type of numbered plastic. Up till then, the only plastics they would take were type 1 and clear type 2 only -- if you tried to recycle a white Tropicana type 2 bottle, they'd leave it -- and the only types of paper were newspaper, magazines, and corrugated cardboard (no mail, no cereal boxes).

Now that it's changed, we definitely put more in the recycling bin than in the garbage bin.

My sister used to live near Fort Lewis, and they didn't even have recycling. Blew my mind.

@18: I spent the five years that I lived there fishing stuff out of the recycling bin that my Seattle-trained spouse kept putting in there. He just couldn't wrap his head around how crappy the recycling program actually was.

@ Charles Mudede, why must you always be so divisive? Quit trying to start fights between places. North Seattle has architecture too!