Open for recycling. It's right off the main road, although Waze says it's like 1/2 mile north of…read morewhere it really is. The workers are super helpful. Everything has to be in bags except the cardboard.

In So IL to do some work, I looked on the Carterville city website for a local recycling center. I…read morehave over three month's worth of neatly sorted cardboard, chipboard, glass, plastics #1 & 2 (most facilities no longer accept higher # plastics), some aluminum cans, and paper. They're all in separate cardboard boxes in my car ready to be sorted into the correct bins at a local recycling center. I've been doing this nearly weekly since I was in college from state to state, including the most rural reaches of some of the least populated US states like Montana. On arriving at Progress Port Recycling Center, what do I read? "All items must be in a bag except large cardboard." Whaaaaaaat? So to encourage the public to be responsible and recycle, this facility deems it reasonable to have us place each kind of recyclable in an ocean-clogging plastic bag first. Or to pay for biodegradable plastic bags that can cost upwards of 30-times per square inch the cost of cheapo grocery-store bought plastic trash bags. This is an epic recycling fail. Progress Port Recycling Center has large bins right outside clearly marked with each kind of permitted recyclable. But they further discourage citizens from doing the responsible thing by threatening us with notices that the facility is under video surveillance (cameras ARE visible) to be sure we're following the rules. This is the only recycling facility in the entire US I've ever been to with such an insipid, counter-productive dump-your-recyclables-in-nonrecyclable-plastic-bags-first rule. We drove to nearby Carbondale that has a vastly more rational recycling center--giant bins indoors, each dedicated to a different kind of recyclable consumers can sort for ourselves. It's far more ecologically sustainable. Consumers don't have to waste money to buy non-recyclable plastic bags or expensive and energy inefficient paper bags ... to recycle. This, in turn, encourages consumers to do the right thing. Sheesh.