Since we live in a new development in Bloomington, the City hasn’t officially taken ownership of our street. The portion of South Dunn between Driscoll and Hillside wasn’t there two years ago. It was an empty field. (I can remember visiting the site shortly after the groundbreaking ceremony with Laura and my folks to see all the junk people had left in the open land.) The last time I checked with Matt Press, the South Dunn Developer, the city was demanding a specific gradient to the alleyways before they took over. The last I heard, that was on target to be fixed in Autumn 2008. Not yet.
In the meantime, we’re left with a private trash hauler, despite paying city taxes. Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to not have to do the 11PM rush to O’Malia’s because you’ve run out of trash tags for the city haulers, but it really sucks to not have recycling pickup.
Bloomington has an awesome recycling program. Any plastics from 1 through 7 can all be mixed together with cardboard, magazines, green glass, clear glass, and newspaper. That means no sorting. And they get it every two weeks so it doesn’t pile up.
Our solution has been to take things to the county recycling center on South Walnut. In addition to being far less convenient, they have more restrictions on what they’ll take: plastics 1 and 2 only. I cringe every time I throw out a perfectly good Pizza Express cup because the county won’t take it. I’m not quite sure why there’s a discrepancy. My guess is that the city and county outsource their recycling differently.
I may need to make friends with someone on the street next door and just start walking my recycling over to them if this lasts much longer.
Update: After a few well-timed e-mails to the City of Bloomington, HAND, and the Bryan Park Neighborhood Development, we’ve finally gotten the city to initiate services on April 13th. The neighbors seem to think I did this singlehandedly, though it came about after a lot of lobbying by Matt Press and others on our street. Yeah!
