Pasco County residents can no longer use blue bags for the county’s curbside recycling program.
Instead, officials are moving towards the use of rigid containers.
The change takes effect Oct. 1. After that, garbage haulers will no longer pick up bagged recyclables. Instead, residents will have to use their own containers for recycling.
The county will provide residents with bright stickers to designate that the container is to be used for recycling.
Officials said they are trying to eliminate the use of bags from the county’s recycling stream. Bags slow down the separation process, become entangled and machinery and contaminate bales of material, which devalues the material.
The market for recyclable materials has been in a downslide for several months, and so the change is an attempt to make those materials more acceptable to processors.