VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — If you care about the environment, it's important to be mindful of which materials you recycle and pre-cycle.
“Your recycling is only as good as your neighbor’s,” said Kristi Rines, the City of Virginia Beach’s Recycling Coordinator.
We met up with her at the city’s only landfill.
“This is what I like to call the one-stop drop,” she said. "So, residents can bring in any household waste."
The landfill accepts items that need to be processed differently, like hazardous household waste or bulky items, like refrigerators.
They also take all sorts of recycling, including paper, cardboard, aluminum and more.
At the landfill, you can also get the help you need sorting out what goes where.
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“Our attendants are really good at making sure the residents weren't putting the wrong items into those compactors," said Rines. "We don't have the advantage of doing that out in neighborhoods, you know, and lifting lids and looking in the carts and trying to tell people some things that you never want to see in a recycling cart."
In 2023, 125,100 tons of trash and 22,302 tons of recycling was collected from homes in Virginia Beach.
At the landfill, they helped collect even more.
From 229,335 visits to the landfill, 1,430 tons of metal were collected, along with 108 tons of tires, 4,500 gallons of used cooking oil, and much more.
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One issue that does seem to come up often is plastic bags.
“Plastic bags should never go in regular recycling,” said Rines. "It’s one of the things that we see a lot, and even residents who watch this whole know is that you always have somebody to bag the recyclables and put that bag into the recycling cart. What that does is it guarantees that everything you bagged all your good habits just went to waste.”
Plastic bags need to be recycled at special drop-off sites, like grocery stores.
Rines encourages bringing reusable bags to shop and practicing more pre-cycling: thinking about where you can reuse older things you no longer have use for instead of trashing them.
These include items like old linens or towels that can be donated to animal shelters or empty clean glass jars for storage.
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“If you can just minimize overall waste and really take a good look at just consumerism as a whole, that I think gives us longevity with what we're trying to do,” said Rines.
One Virginia Beach resident I spoke to does exactly this.
“Broken beach chairs. People leave beach chairs on the beach, they're aluminum,” said Couzin Ed. "When they're left down there, I bring them home, cut them up. The pieces I don't use, I recycle."
He tells me he not only recycles as much as he can, he creates beautiful pieces of art he gifts to friends. He's turned broken beach chairs into beautiful wind chimes and pieces of scrap wood into birdhouses.
“I recycle where I can,” he told me. "You know, I do my little bit."
He tells me he grew up in a time when we all cared more about recycling and people weren’t so apathetic to environmental issues.
“It's sad how much we’ve become a disposable society,” said Couzin Ed. “It's a shame that people don't recycle more.”
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Back at the landfill, Rines tells me they see the difference recycling makes every day. That's why she encourages everyone to rethink what they toss and ways to reduce their overall waste.
“It does make a difference because that's material that's not going to a landfill," she said. "It's not being incinerated, you know, for waste energy. So, it makes a difference on a few things.”
If you still aren’t sure what can go in your recycling, just check out the tops of your bins. There, you’ll find a little cheat sheet telling you what can go into the bin.
And if you’re still confused, just remember: "when in doubt, throw it out."
