Rhea Homa is a recycling advocate.
But as she’s lived in three places in Allegheny County — Monroeville, Verona and the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill — she’s encountered three different rules about recycling.
“It’s not easy to determine what those rules are,” Homa, now of Verona, said Friday at a press conference in Allegheny County Controller Chelsa Wagner’s office, where Wagner unveiled a new website that she hopes will become a clearinghouse for county recycling information. It can be found at alleghenycontroller.com.
“People want to do the right thing, but there is a lot of confusion,” Wagner said. “Our office has worked over the past several months to develop this tool.”
People enter their address on the website and find out if curbside recycling is offered, what their municipality’s guidelines are and where to recycle other items. The site also includes information about disposing electronics, appliances and other hard-to-recycle products.
The site offers one place where all of the procedures for the county’s 130 municipalities can be viewed.
Each of Allegheny County’s 1.2 million residents creates about 4 pounds of unrecycled trash per year and the county recycles 32% of its waste each year, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection’s solid waste recycling plan that Wagner cited.
“Right now the information has been piecemeal and fairly inconvenient to access,” Wagner said. “We are hopeful that what we are able to provide today is a start.”
