EVANSVILLE − When the recycling bin in her apartment's full, Evansville resident Kris Evans loads all the materials into her car and hauls it to a container at the Flourish Plant-Based Eatery, the restaurant she works at in town. 

Evans said she usually has to do that once a week or once every other week. She lives in the Driftwood Apartments on North Fulton Avenue. The complex, like many others in the city, doesn't offer recycling services to tenants.

Residential households  — some 38,000, according to Evansville Water & Sewer Utility's Daniel Claspell —  get their recyclables collected by the city's trash and recycling pickup, work that is contracted to Republic Services. Those living in apartment complexes don't have that option, and are either beholden to what their landlord offers or they have to haul their materials to a city drop off.

Claspell, Director of Administration for EWSU, said the utility would not attempt to dictate what a commercial business does with its waste and that the amount of people living in apartments in the city is not a substantial total compared to the 38,000 already getting their recycling picked up by EWSU.

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“The onus lies on (renters) to contact their landlord or apartment manager and work through them to get recycling service if it isn’t already offered," he said.

Ella Johnson-Watson, EWSU's Director of Communications, also clarified that it would be difficult for the utility to try to offer apartment renters trash and recycling services because it's much harder to keep track of who is coming and going in apartments compared to residential homes.

"When we have a residential customer discontinue their service, they know that they're no longer receiving trash pickup," Johnson-Watson said. "With apartment complexes, people can come and go throughout the month and that would be a challenge."

A few apartment complexes that say they offer recycling services:

And a few that say they don't:

A representative for The Timbers said the complex offers a single recycling container for residents that gets emptied by Republic Services. The container was added a few years ago after repeated requests from tenants.

Wesselman Woods once offered off-site recycling once or twice a month, but that service ends will come to an end with one final drop-off window on July 23 at old Walmart West. After that date, the Laubscher Meadows Landfill, located at 2121 Wimberg Road, will be the only drop-off location in the city for recycling.

Jean Carlson, the director of the Vanderburgh County Solid Waste District, said she doesn’t know if the city will want to replace the outgoing Wesselman Woods drop-off sites. 

“Over the years, participation (at the drop-off sites) decreased quite a bit,” Carlson said. “We went from about 200 tons a year to 50 tons.”

Carlson attributed the decrease in participation to more people − particularly county residents − gaining access to curbside recycling pickup. 

Not only did participation rates fall, but the cost of dumpsters went up, Carlson said, and so did the amount of dumping of non-recyclable items into those dumpsters.

And that defeats the purpose of having recycling bins in the first place, Carlson said. Crews would have to unload the contaminated recycling at the landfill instead of Tri-State Resource Recovery, the organization that holds the city’s recycling contract.

Concern over contaminated recycling was a common theme among people the Courier & Press spoke to for this story. That includes Evans, who said she worried about where her recycling ended up.

“Not many people seem to know how to recycle properly,” Evans said. “I’m not even sure the recycling I do (drop off) gets recycled or has to be thrown out because it’s contaminated.”

Brian Whitesell, the general manager at Tri-State Resource Recovery, which receives all the city’s curbside recycling, along with the recyclables of county residents who subscribe to Republic Services’ or Waste Management’s trash and recycling pickup, said contamination rates have steadily risen, by about 40%, since the operation started in 2013.

The rate of contamination has climbed from 8% in 2013 to around 14% now, which Whitesell said is closer to the national average. 

Recyclable items include No. 1 through No. 7 plastics, newspaper, cardboard, aluminum and steel, food, cans and glass, Whitesell said. Other items, including trash, are considered contaminants.

Whitesell chalks the rising rate up to a lack of education on what is and what isn’t recyclable – and people being lazy.

"It's just like anything you do at your house, right?” Whitesell said. “You get accustomed to something, you get a little lazy with it, you get a little sloppy, and then there are consequences to that.”

Mary Allen, a co-founder of Zero Waste Evansville, a Facebook group dedicated to sharing ideas and promoting legislative action and education on reducing, reusing and recycling with over 1,800 members, agreed that education on proper recycling procedures is a necessity.

"I think we have a long way to go, especially in our area," Allen said. "Markets fluctuate what (recycling centers) can and can't take and that can pose a challenge."

Allen also owns Sixth + Zero, a sustainable soap shop on Evansville's main street. She said she created a local landing page on her website for glass recycling because she felt people weren't finding accurate information on how to dispose of it properly.

Allen hopes the Zero Waste Evansville group will be able to educate people, especially kids, in the coming months and years on sustainability tips and on proper methods for reducing, reusing and recycling. For Allen, it isn't about shaming people who don't recycle, but helping them develop a mindset where it becomes second nature.

"I don't think anybody's just intentionally disruptive to the environment, to our planet, but I just think we're busy," Allen said. "Convenience rules the day and we just aren't mindful of our consumption."

She said she's seen the recycling dumpster behind Sixth + Zero is also frequently infested with trash because people will walk down the alleyway and just throw anything in it.

She also owns and manages rental properties in town and said there's been several times she's personally had to remove trash from tenant's recycling bins and put them in the trash receptacle.

Despite the headaches caused with receptacle misuse, Allen still believes it's worth it for complexes to offer recycling options to renters.

"I think especially if you want to appeal to a certain demographic − a lot of younger people coming into Evansville care about the environment, they care about climate issues and recycling is one piece of that."

Evans, who's also a member of the Zero Waste Facebook group, said the main reason she recycles is because she believes companies and industries that create a significant amount of waste don't use their resources and money to create a closed-loop. Closed-loop recycling is a process in which goods are recycled and reprocessed into the same or similar products so that a negligible amount of waste ends up in landfills.

Closed loop recycling is the process of collecting and reprocessing recycled goods without losing the integrity of the original material. In a closed loop, goods are recycled over and over again and remade into the same (or similar) products every time, without any waste going to a landfill.

Without a closed loop, Evans believes the burden of recycling falls to people like her. But she'd rather do it herself than not have it done at all.

"(If I didn't recycle) I'd just feel really bad," Evans said. "I've been doing it for years. It's just like a part of my life now."

Contact Ray Couture at rcouture@courierpress.com or on Twitter @raybc94