PROVIDENCE — Wearing neon reflective vests, environmental inspectors Steven Badessa and Al Giuliano trudged up Pavilion Avenue one frigid morning last week and peered into recycling bins placed at the curb for pickup.

The first blue lid they flipped open revealed a cluster of single-use plastic bags holding a bunch of bottles and cans.

“There’s too many plastic bags,” Giuliano said, as Badessa jotted down notes on a clipboard.

The inspectors left a tag on the bin describing what can and can’t be recycled, and marked the bin so that the recycling truck would not pick it up when it made the rounds later that morning.

Then they continued up the street, their breath visible in the cold air, inspecting and marking bins, leaving untouched those that passed the test.

“The purpose is, we’re looking at contamination within our recycling stream,” said Francisco Ramirez, associate director of environmental control with the Providence Department of Public Works. “We’re trying to rid the contamination.”

Teams of environmental inspectors regularly sweep city neighborhoods in this way, checking to see if residents are recycling correctly, and attempting to educate those who are not. If an area has repeated violations, inspectors will start to issue $50 fines to residents who don’t follow the rules of recycling.

“Really, what we want is compliance, at the end of the day,” Ramirez said.

Last year, inspectors issued 4,435 warnings and 2,997 fines to residents as part of the recycling inspection program, according to Ramirez.

Recycling is mandatory in Rhode Island, and the City of Providence has an incentive to recycle often and recycle right.

The city must pay $47 a ton to deposit waste at the state landfill in Johnston, Ramirez said. Recycling, though, is free, as long as the loads are not too contaminated with items that can’t be recycled through the state’s mixed recycling stream.

The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, the center that processes all of the state’s recycling, can reject any truckload that contains more than 10 percent non-recyclable items, said Krystal Noiseux, education and outreach manager at the center. But more typically, the center accepts loads that contain up to 30 or 40 percent non-recyclable materials, she said.

When it drops off contaminated loads, the city gets hit with a double whammy of fines and tipping fees, Ramirez said. It must pay a $250 rejection fee at the center, plus the price of depositing the waste at the landfill, he said.

So what are the most common items people try to recycle, but shouldn’t?

“Food scraps is one,” Ramirez said. “Yard debris ... is another. Construction debris...

“And plastic bags is number one,” he said. “How could we forget?”

Plastic bags actually are recyclable, Noiseux said, but they can’t be included in the state’s mixed recycling stream because they jam up the processing equipment at the recovery center.

“Plastic bags are something that get caught up and wrap around all the spinning machinery in the facility,” she said.

Residents who wish to recycle their plastic bags can bring them to most grocery stores, which have receptacles specifically for recycling single-use plastic bags, she said.

Residents should also remember to rinse out their recyclables whenever possible and check that the item can be placed in the state’s recycling stream before tossing it into the bin, she said. As a general rule, the recycling center only accepts certain items based on material. It accepts metal cans, lids and foil, glass bottles and jars, and plastic bottles and containers.

When the recycling plant does well, so do cities and towns.

Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation shares its profits with municipalities based on how many tons they recycle. The corporation hasn’t turned a profit in the past three years, Noiseaux said, because the recycling market has slowed. This is mainly because China has stopped buying American recyclables due to the high rates of contamination in the loads.

The last time the corporation did turn a profit, in 2015, Providence received a payment of $33,157, she said. In 2014, the payment was $99,537.

The city began its concerted effort to improve residents’ recycling habits in 2016 when the Department of Public Works piloted the recycling inspections on a route in Washington Park. Through the inspections and education outreach, that route improved from one that had contaminated recycling bins about half of the time to one that consistently passed inspection, according to Victor Morente, press secretary for Mayor Jorge Elorza’s office.

Diomedes Uasqua Peno, a Providence resident whose recycling bin did not pass inspection last week, said he didn’t mind that his recycling wasn’t picked up because it was contaminated.

“It’s good that they leave it,” said Peno, 36, speaking in Spanish.

He said he appreciated the cards left behind by inspectors that inform residents about how to recycle properly and said recycling was good for the environment.

But other residents feel the inspections are an invasion of privacy.

“Big Brother is at it again! This time it’s the ‘trash police,’” wrote Providence resident Mary Batastini in a January letter to the editor. “George Orwell certainly missed this one!”

Morente, though, said the city’s goal is simply to educate residents and raise awareness about recycling. Generally, fines are issued only after multiple warnings, he said.

“Typically, the last resort is a violation,” he said.

The city’s outlay for contaminated recycling has declined since June 2017, when the city paid $76,182 in load-rejection fines for 1,327 tons of recycling rejected by the Resource Recovery Corporation, according to city data.

Last month, the city paid $40,453 in load-rejection fines for 658 tons of recycling disallowed by the plant.

The city paid a total of $230,284 last month to dispose of waste at the landfill — that's for everything the city dumped there, both regular trash and rejected recycling loads.

Ramirez said he estimates that if residents recycle properly and the loads aren’t contaminated with non-recyclable items, the city could save around $700,000 a year in tipping fees, to say nothing of the fines.

Beyond the cost savings, Elyena de Goguel, an employee in Providence's health and sustainability program, said residents should care about recycling because of its benefits for the planet.

“There’s so much waste going to our landfill right now,” she said. “They’re slowly filling up, and all of those materials that can be recycled can be diverted from the landfill and used as other materials down the line. They can have a second life or a third life even.”

The Central Landfill in Johnston, which collects trash for the entire state, is projected to reach capacity in 2034, though that date is subject to change, said Noiseux, of Rhode Island Resource Recovery.

Diverting recyclable materials from the landfill and saving the city money in waste disposal fees is a win-win for Providence, Ramirez said.

“We want to do the right thing as a city,” he said. “We want residents to do the right thing. And we all benefit from it financially, also environmentally.”

What's recyclable, and not

The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation asks residents to recycle only the following items in curbside bins and carts:

- Paper, cardboard and cartons (but no shredded paper, napkins, tissues or paper towels).

- Metal cans, lids and foil.

- Glass bottles and jars.

- Plastic containers (no foam containers, or plastic containers that once held flammable materials or oily chemicals such as gasoline, motor oil, antifreeze, pesticides or herbicides).

- DO NOT include plastic bags, bags of bags or recyclables inside bags.

— mlist@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @madeleine_list