Recycling plan an idea that doesn’t stink

Mary Kinas, Las Vegas

Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010 | 2:03 a.m.

We moved to Las Vegas in 2001 from the central Phoenix area.

Phoenix has had the green bin/blue bin recycling for many years and the system works extremely well. (Green bins are for trash picked up once a week, blue bins are for recycling picked up once a week.)

Even though Phoenix is hotter than Las Vegas in the summer, the smell of our green bin never became a problem — we were careful to put food waste in the disposer, and we wrapped our baby diapers carefully.

That amount of effort was well worth the convenience of the blue bin, where we could throw all of our recyclables, plastic, paper and glass. There were many weeks when our blue bin was much more full than our green bin.

I urge the Clark County Commission to adopt the once-weekly trash pickup and once-weekly recycling pickup schedule, as was previously proposed by Republic Services. The argument that the trash will smell after the week is speculative, and is being made by people who have never lived in a hot climate with the same system.