Curious about where to take your CRV recycling in Petaluma? The Cool Business Collective steering committee had the opportunity to tour our local recycling center on 2nd Street recently. It was soooo cool to geek out on how they recycle, what they take, why they do it, and how we can all help and get paid while doing it!
United Cerebral Palsy of the North Bay runs this facility as an employment and job training site for adults with developmental disabilities enrolled in Supported Employment. This is more than just a job for folks, it is a training ground and a way to educate about a more just and circular economy.
This facility helps Petalumans recycle better with single-stream recycling, you get your CRV back that you paid at the register, and it provides local jobs, and the money stays in our community to fund other UCPNB projects. It's a win all around!!
Let's chat more about that CRV you're paying. It's on wine bottles too! When you buy a beverage at the store, there's a $.05-$.10 charge for CRV. This goes into a state fund. The best way to get back the money you paid is to drop off at a recycling facility like this. They also just launched drop and go recycling. It's automated, so you can do this anytime! Psst! One will be going into the Petaluma Outlet Mall in August!
Check out all the cans that will head off to be recycled! Side note, please do not crush your cans. They can be hand crushed, but not machine crushed, so the CRV can be seen, and you get full credit for it.
We had so much fun watching the cans go through the can crusher machine at the facility and seeing the output. It was like we were kids seeing the coolest thing ever! All with our phones out, just waiting for the next bundle to be pushed out of the machine.
Why do they crush the cans like this? So they can increase how many cans can be baled and put on a pallet to be sent off to the facility to be recycled.
In case you missed it, plastic bottle caps are to remain on the bottles. This helps them get recycled instead of falling through the cracks on the conveyors.
The app for recycling will soon have an option to be able to donate your CRV funds to a non-profit. This is exciting news! I would love to give a shout-out to Cool Petaluma as an option to donate to. Without their leadership and community infrastructure that they have built over the past handful of years, we as a business community and local Petalumans wouldn't have the cohesiveness for climate solutions we have now. Cool Petaluma plays an important role here in our town, and we would love for them to continue to be able to do this!
Ok, back to the recycling facility. You can take up to 100 pounds of aluminum or plastic per day and up to 1,000 pounds of glass per day.
Now for the fun part! We are going to start collecting those tired, broken, old stainless steel reusable water bottles and coffee mugs at our shop!
Please only the bottle and rinsed out, and during business hours. We will then drop them off at the UCP recycling facility at a coordinated time. These are not typically accepted at the facility, please do not take them directly there, or it will likely be refused. They will work with their scrap metal team and receive any funds for recycling the scrap metal. This also keeps things going at the facility and helps keep it all in our community.
These bottles and mugs are not currently accepted in our curbside recycling, but can be taken to Recology's transfer stations for scrap metal recycling if you don't want to drop at the shop.
Will you start recycling at the local facility? Or do you already? It's so awesome we have this as a resource in Petaluma!
