It doesn’t sound like much. Each day, Ulster County residents generate about four pounds of waste—the weight of a laptop computer. Combine that with trash from businesses and municipalities, though, and the figure rises to 5.97 million pounds.

A year after the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency bowed to community opposition and halted efforts to seek new landfill sites, officials are stepping up efforts to reduce that waste by educating residents on what can and can’t be recycled.

“People often have the desire to recycle anything that’s plastic or metal or glass,” said Angelina Brandt, the agency’s director of sustainability. “Just because an object is made from one of those materials doesn’t mean it’s going to fit through the machinery.”

Rather than guess, Brandt wants residents to memorize shapes. As long as certain items are bigger than a tennis ball, ensuring they won’t fall through the machinery, they can go into the recycling bin.

“The best thing you can do to be a better recycler is to recycle by shape,” she said. “Is it a bottle, jug, jar, tub or lid?”

If plastics are the right shape but too small, she recommended saving and storing them until there’s enough to safely recycle.

Brandt also recommended disregarding the number system for recycling plastic. That triangle shape on many plastic containers, which many people believe classifies them as recyclable? Think again.

“That number is only indicating the type of plastic that was made to create that object,” she said. “It is not an indicator of recyclability at all.”

While such misunderstandings are common, Brandt said they don’t reflect what’s happening behind the scenes.

“Consumers are skeptical about what’s happening,” she said. “There’s a lot of rhetoric out there that wants you to believe that recycling has failed.”

Ulster County law requires all unrecyclable garbage, known in the waste management industry as municipal solid waste, to be disposed of at specific sites. That’s another task for the recovery agency, a public benefit corporation that manages solid waste while emphasizing resource recovery and sustainability.

Whether residents place their trash in a commercial dumpster, curbside waste bin, or local town transfer station, it makes its way to one of the agency’s transfer stations in New Paltz or Kingston to be consolidated. Once there, it’s subject to a fee of $150 per ton of trash, with higher fees for some types of material.

After the trash is processed, it’s shipped by tractor-trailer to the Seneca Meadows landfill in central New York. Six days a week, 15 trucks packed with 35 tons of garbage apiece make the 500-mile round trip.

At the agency’s Kingston facility, recycling is a focus. A material recovery facility on the property uses a dual-stream system to process about 20% of all recyclable materials in Ulster County and then sells the recovered material. Those materials have already been sorted by residents into distinct categories at their local transfer stations.

Single-stream recycling, in which material is mixed together in a bin, makes up the other 80%. It’s common in curbside recycling bins and commercial recycling dumpsters.

Those materials are shipped to privately owned facilities in Albany and Beacon because Ulster County’s facility is too small to process the volume of single-stream recyclables.

Despite pre-sorting material, the facility still receives material, specifically plastic, that can’t be recycled.

“It’s complicated,” Brandt said.

Kyle Bredberg is an intern and contributing reporter. You can reach him at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.