“I would not count on the program coming back to HEB,” said Darryl Lambert, Area Manager of Abitibi Consolidated Recycling.

Abitibi had operated a paper recycling bin at the Tomball grocery store for more than a decade. However, when the company placed a second bin for plastics and metal, things got messy.

“What we end up finding over the last four or five months was that the trash content increased,” Lambert said.

While the paper recycling bin remained trash free, people began using the plastics and metals container for a trash receptacle; and, as of late last week, were continuing to use the area as a dumping ground.

“Nobody contaminated the paper bin,” Lambert said. “But we’d get the plastics one back, and go ‘wow, what’s going on here.’ It cost us too much in trash disposal.”

Throughout the summer, trash began to pile high up around the bins and into the HEB parking lot.

“In addition to non-recyclables being put in the collection bins, trash was being dumped around the bins creating a potential health hazard,” Susan Ghertner, Environmental Affairs Manager with HEB stated last week in a press release.

“I don’t blame them one way, shape or form,” Lambert said. “We’ve got to seriously look at what we’re doing here.”

Lambert added that the “cost outweighed the benefit” for the recycling program at HEB. He said local residents identified with green and yellow paper recycling bins, but the “green and blue ones for plastics got abused.”

The responsibility now falls on HEB to removing the trash, Lambert said. By the middle of last week, much of the trash had been removed.

Ghertner said that the decision to remove the bins was not a “spur-of-the-moment” one.

“The problem had been going on for some time,” she said. “We were disappointed to remove the bins knowing that, in some communities, this may be the only recycling option available to our customers.”

Indeed, it may be difficult for Tomball area residents to find a suitable place to recycle their plastics, metals and other items.

“In the Tomball area, I think we were the only game in town,” Lambert said.

The City of Tomball does offer to pick newsprint, some plastic containers and aluminum and bi-metal cans in special recycling bins provided by Waste Management. The city does not offer to pick up glass products and all recyclables must be rinsed and free of food products.

Harris County also offers on its website a 12-page “Recycle & Disposal Quick Guide,” which lists several locations that accept recyclables throughout the northwest Houston area.

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