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Recycling Disposal Guide
Recycling is so much easier than many people think. There has been much confusion in the past because recycling was indeed a difficult process in its early days. However, technology and technique have both increased dramatically and now recycling is easier than ever!
The City of Longview Sanitation Division provides our residential customers a 95 gallon trash cart and a 95 gallon recycling cart as a way to increase recycling. The recycling cart has a blue lid and goes with the City's Blue recycling program. Residents can simply place all of their recycling in that blue cart and place it at the curb on their day of collection. Click here for more information on our Commercial Recycling Program.
The City of Longview is now able to accept plastic #1 - #2. Please do NOT recycle plastics #3 - #7. The way to find the number is to look on the bottom of the item and find the recycling symbol. It will have a number in it. Plastics are numbered by the materials used to make them.
Please make sure that plastics have no food or liquids in them, or they cannot be accepted. Rinsing and then crushing will also help your bin to not stink and have more room.
The City of Longview accepts household metal cans including beverage and soup cans. Cans and other, larger items can also be taken to a local scrap yard to be redeemed for cash.
The City of Longview accepts all forms of paper including newspaper, plain white paper, office paper, colored paper, junk mail, colored glossy paper, magazines and cardboard. If you can tear it, we can take it!
Glass can be recycled by taking to the drop off location at the City of Longview Compost Site. Items that are acceptable are bottles and jars of any color. Items not acceptable are items such as mirrors, light bulbs and auto glass.
Glass is not recycled as a part of residential curbside recycling because it is dangerous for the workers of the Material Recovery Facility in Kilgore. When glass gets caught in the machinery it explodes and sends shards of glass at the machine operators. This also damages equipment because glass is made from sand and running sand through machine gears is very damaging to those gears. Glass also gets into the paper and ruins the paper fibers so that they cannot be used and must go to the landfill.
The City of Longview does not currently accept Styrofoam for recycling. Many cities do not recycle Styrofoam as well as it is a very caustic and difficult material to process. Scientists still have not been able to determine how long Styrofoam takes to break down and decompose in a landfill. They can only say it take 1,000,000+ years.
The best way to deal with Styrofoam is to reduce the amount of it used and to reuse those cups as many times as possible before discarding into the trash.
Single Stream
In the past, if people wanted to recycle, they had to divide all of the plastics, aluminum, paper and cardboard into separate containers. This is not so in Longview! The City of Longview Sanitation Division incorporates a process called "Single Stream Recycling." This process is much simpler for those who recycle. Now all of those items can be put together into the one blue bin or cart. The objects are then sent to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Kilgore where they are separated, baled and sold on the market to factories, paper mills and any other manufactures that use recycled materials. Single stream recycling has made recycling easier than ever.Do the Blue
The City of Longview Sanitation Division provides our residential customers a 95 gallon trash cart and a 95 gallon recycling cart as a way to increase recycling. The recycling cart has a blue lid and goes with the City's Blue recycling program. Residents can simply place all of their recycling in that blue cart and place it at the curb on their day of collection. Click here for more information on our Commercial Recycling Program.
Plastics
The City of Longview is now able to accept plastic #1 - #2. Please do NOT recycle plastics #3 - #7. The way to find the number is to look on the bottom of the item and find the recycling symbol. It will have a number in it. Plastics are numbered by the materials used to make them.
Please make sure that plastics have no food or liquids in them, or they cannot be accepted. Rinsing and then crushing will also help your bin to not stink and have more room.
Metals
The City of Longview accepts household metal cans including beverage and soup cans. Cans and other, larger items can also be taken to a local scrap yard to be redeemed for cash.
Paper and Cardboard
The City of Longview accepts all forms of paper including newspaper, plain white paper, office paper, colored paper, junk mail, colored glossy paper, magazines and cardboard. If you can tear it, we can take it!
Glass
Glass can be recycled by taking to the drop off location at the City of Longview Compost Site. Items that are acceptable are bottles and jars of any color. Items not acceptable are items such as mirrors, light bulbs and auto glass.
Glass is not recycled as a part of residential curbside recycling because it is dangerous for the workers of the Material Recovery Facility in Kilgore. When glass gets caught in the machinery it explodes and sends shards of glass at the machine operators. This also damages equipment because glass is made from sand and running sand through machine gears is very damaging to those gears. Glass also gets into the paper and ruins the paper fibers so that they cannot be used and must go to the landfill.
Styrofoam
The City of Longview does not currently accept Styrofoam for recycling. Many cities do not recycle Styrofoam as well as it is a very caustic and difficult material to process. Scientists still have not been able to determine how long Styrofoam takes to break down and decompose in a landfill. They can only say it take 1,000,000+ years.
The best way to deal with Styrofoam is to reduce the amount of it used and to reuse those cups as many times as possible before discarding into the trash.