The Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection is touting the RecycleCT Wizard App, which will help residents quickly discover which household items are acceptable in their recycling bins, tips for reusing certain materials, and how to contact local recycling coordinators or transfer stations. The app was developed by the nonprofit RecycleCT Foundation. While the foundation’s previous web-based search tool has been very successful, the app will increase ease and access, likely doubling the number of inquiries, and will add languages beyond English and Spanish including French, Simplified Chinese, and Portuguese.
“Now more than ever, increasing recycling, and decreasing contamination in our recycling stream is especially important for Connecticut residents,” says DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes. “Effective recycling is one of our most valuable tools to combat Connecticut’s waste disposal crisis. When DEEP convened the Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management last year with more than 80 municipalities to explore sustainable materials management solutions, increasing recycling was chief among the solutions explored. Thank you to RecycleCT for taking what was already a tremendous educational tool for residents and making it even more accessible and easy to use with this new app.”
The Recycle CT Wizard search tool has already been used by many people trying to recycle correctly. To date, there have been more than 707,000 searches through the RecycleCT Wizard, with the top five searched materials being expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam), shredded paper, plastic bags, pizza boxes, and plastic plant pots/trays.
