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SANDY — The Canyons School District is reevaluating its community recycling program after people have been throwing in items that don't belong, creating a problem that is too expensive to fix.
"Roughly about 95% of our 50 schools and programs started out with the recycling program," said district spokesman Jeff Haney.
But now, students will slowly stop seeing those blue recycling bins. "It started to cost the district a lot of money to provide this recycling," he said.
The change is not because students and faculty didn't want to recycle but because the district was being hit with approximately $100,000 in contamination fees.
"We were seeing people from the community drop a lot of stuff that would contaminate all of those materials that could have been recycled," Haney said.
He said items like garbage, construction materials, furniture and even dead animals have been found in the bins.
"Not just dogs and cats, but also after people went hunting, they would drop some of the carcasses of the animals that they had hunted," Haney said.
He added that custodians were taking too much time to sort through the recycling bins and remove items. The district is now phasing out its program, starting with Draper Park Middle School in Draper.
"It certainly was frustrating because you want to discuss in classrooms where you can be environmentally conscious as a school and then hopefully as an entire community. But what we were finding is that not only were people dropping paint or construction materials or even animal carcasses, but even when those recycling bins were full, people in the community would just stack up materials," Haney said.
Haney said schools have cameras but did not say if they caught anyone throwing stuff in the recycling dumpster. He said this was a districtwide issue and was just too expensive to fix.
When asked if people were malicious or ignorant when throwing unrecyclable items in the dumpsters, he said that it was unclear.
"These bins are very clearly marked, and it's hard for me to believe that somebody wouldn't know an old tire wasn't recyclable," Haney said.
