It was a nice perk of the neighborhood, having dumpster-sized recycling bins in Tietze Park for those over-sized loads that didn’t fit in the bins at home. But rampant misuse of this perk caused the City of Dallas to remove the recycling dumpsters from the popular park this week.
“There’s been a lot of issues with people illegally dumping in those bins,” says Oscar Carmona, assistant director of the Dallas Parks and Recreation Department. “The situation never gets better, no matter what we do.”
On a near weekly basis, people used the bins to dump everything from construction waste like carpeting and old appliances, to large unwanted items like mattresses to common household trash. It became such a recurring problem, that the city heard regular complaints from park-goers.
“People call to complain about these big piles of trash out by the bins,” Carmona says. “In some parks, it just becomes an ongoing issue. That was the case in Tietze.”
For a while, sanitation workers took the added step of sorting the trash from the recyclables, but that became too costly to continue. They considered putting up security cameras or scheduling more pick-ups in the park, but both those plans required additional dollars the city didn’t have to spend.
“It’s really taxing on sanitation,” Carmona says. “So they’re temporarily pulling those bins out of Tietze Park.”
Carmona added that sanitation will “monitor the situation out there. Maybe [the bins] can come back in the future.”
For now, neighbors will have to rely on their home recycling bins for those boxes and cans, or schlep it over to one of the city’s recycling centers (see a map of them here).
