Recycling law for stores ignored in Rehoboth

• Nearly every weekday, it's obvious many beach-town stores ignore a state recycling mandate
• Rehoboth Beach doesn't offer municipal recycling services to businesses
• The town did offer residential recycling ahead of a state requirement

Even kindergartners know the drill: Recycle whatever you can to save the planet. But a morning stroll down Rehoboth Beach's main shopping street shows that lesson has not caught on everywhere.

In Rehoboth, where there's no city-run recycling service for the commercial sector, scores of businesses put recyclables out with the regular trash on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. And he city's trash trucks pick it up and take it to the landfill.

That violates a state law requiring businesses to engage in "comprehensive recycling" programs, even if their local governments don't offer tax-funded recycling.

City leaders acknowledge the conflict but say it's on the state, not them, to enforce the mandate.

"I don't believe it's a city function to police recycling," said Stan Mills, a Rehoboth Beach commissioner who's often worked on trash policy for the city. "I think the onus is on the business, and we have to look to the state to help enforce that."

A Rehoboth blogger, Alan Henney, highlighted the disconnect when he posted photos of Rehoboth trash crews picking up recyclables, including marked recycling containers.

Rehoboth isn't the only place in Delaware where businesses have been slow to adopt to the recycling requirement. The state has had a goal of making sure, by 2015, that at least half of the waste that can be recycled, is recycled. That's known in waste-management circles as a diversion rate, and between 2012 and 2013, the diversion rate statewide climbed from 40.1 percent to 41.9 percent. But the next year, it fell to  41.8 percent, according to a report from the Recycling Public Advisory Council. The rate is higher for residences than for businesses.

In fact, the report shows fewer than four of every 10 recyclable items Delaware businesses discarded in 2014 got recycled. It's such a nagging problem that state regulators called a meeting this week for trash haulers, both private companies and government departments, to reinforce the law's requirement.

"The commercial sector needs to do a lot more," said Bill Miller, an environmental program manager in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control's solid and hazardous waste management section. "We know there's a lot of commercial businesses that aren't participating in recycling. That's something we're going to focus on."

Rehoboth's pick-it-all-up policy for commercial trash and recycling is working at cross purposes with DNREC's mandate to enforce the recycling law that took effect in 2014.

The law required municipalities to offer recycling service to residents, and Rehoboth does that — in fact, it offered residential recycling as early as 2006. The new law didn't order municipal governments to serve businesses with recycling pickup (although Bethany Beach offers it anyway). Instead, it required the businesses to make arrangements for a "comprehensive recycling" service, whether that involved a local government or a private company in the waste business.

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Rehoboth, of course, has an unusual demand pattern for trash and recycling removal during the year. The need dips in the winter and spikes in the summer — so much so that its trash crews make the rounds of commercial streets on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays in season.

The city has never offered a municipal recycling service to businesses, but many businesses had found it easy enough to take recyclables to a Delaware Solid Waste Authority drop-off spot for recycling near City Hall.

"That was really the one and only option that was provided as a public spot," said Christopher Darr, a Rehoboth resident and a manager at Funland — one of the city's biggest commercial enterprises, and an early adapter to recycling.

That drop-off site was removed by early 2016, when City Hall was demolished to make way for a replacement building. Without that option nearby, businesses started placing recyclables out for regular trash pickup, Darr said. Funland, he said, met its obligation under the recycling law, contracting with one waste company to pick up bottles and another to handle the cardboard all its furry, shiny, noisy carnival-game prizes come packed in.

"We just feel it's our obligation as a business to take care of that end of the business," Darr said. "We're trying to make as small a footprint as possible."

Steve Fallon, owner of the curio store Gidget's Gadgets on Rehoboth Avenue, said he cuts up and packs down cardboard boxes from his inventory shipments and drives them to a DSWA drop-off site in Lewes, now that the Rehoboth one is gone. But plenty of Rehoboth Avenue stores, he said, don't bother, putting veritable mountains of recyclable cardboard out for trash collection.

"They're just taking the boxes and going, here you go, throw it out. It can really look hellacious," Fallon said. "You've got, like, 90 boxes out there. Really?" Still, he said, he knows recycling is a manageable task for his small store, compared to larger retailers and restaurants with a greater volume.

Miller, at DNREC, said the recycling law puts the onus on businesses. Cities like Rehoboth, he said, aren't compelled to sort recyclables from trash when businesses commingle them on trash day.

He said Rehoboth is rare in providing trash service to the business sector without offering recycling too.

"Rehoboth is one of the first situations we've heard about," Miller said. "The business is the one who's got the responsibility, who's at fault. However, we would still look the the municipality to provide those recycling services, particularly when they're providing trash service. We can't make them do that, but we would like to have that conversation."

Krys Johnson, a spokeswoman for the city government, said the reason municipal trash trucks take away obvious recyclables is their crews' mandate to keep the city looking clean and neat.

"The city's very aware that sometimes recycling gets left out. The city trucks have come by and picked it up," Johnson said. "I’m not going to go through and nitpick our entire staff, because they’re doing their job. They want to make sure it’s off the street. The city crews want to ensure that regardless of who it is, people are welcome to our clean, pristine streets and beaches. The city takes that very seriously. ... The overwhelming thing is that we have a clean city, and we work really diligently, our staff does, to do that."

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Darr, at Funland, said he wishes more businesses took their obligation to recycle more seriously. But he notes that enforcement of the state law seems lax enough to let the storefronts get away without doing so.

"Yes, the state’s mandating that businesses are recycling, without any real reason for them to actually do it," Darr said. "It was just convenient and easy for people to just put it on the curb, and the city just threw it in the trash. They're going to take the path of least resistance, and that was it."

DNREC's Miller notes the state offers grants to help businesses get started on recycling. The agency will also do a free "waste characterization" for a business to help them understand just how much of what they throw away can be recycled; Miller says a few dozen stores and companies have signed up for them.

The agency can fine businesses found not to be recycling, but Miller said: "We don't want to be that prescriptive... If a business contacts us, we'll try and help them. We'll lead with that. But there is an expectation that they are participating and they are contributing."

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter@JamesFisherTNJorjfisher@delawareonline.com.