Residents trash Baltimore County’s new calendar-free recycling guide

Scott McGovern has an end-of-the year tradition in common with many other Baltimore County residents.

He keeps an eye on the mail for the county’s annual trash and recycling guide, sent in the form of a 5-inch by 8-inch folded mailer. When it comes, he unfolds and refolds it so the page with the 12-month calendar for his pickup days is facing out. Then he puts it on the refrigerator so he can double check holiday collections, confirm the twice-a-year bulk trash days or find the last date in the fall that lawn clippings are picked up.

“I eagerly wait for it,” McGovern said. “It was so simple.”

Not so this year. The new guide came out last month with 12 colorful pages of illustrated instructions on what can and can’t be recycled, how to mark your waste can for recyclables, and where to go to drop off material yourself. It lists what day of the week a homeowner can expect to have trash, recyclables and yard waste picked up.

Everything, it seemed, but the calendar.

“I kept folding and unfolding it looking for the calendar,” he said. “What am I missing? Where is my calendar?”

Instead, the mailer included a QR code that leads users to the county website, but not a calendar customized to an address. There was no explanation for the lack of an individualized calendar.

Barb Cohn, another county resident, called to complain. “I’m no Luddite, but it’s very presumptuous of them to think everyone has a functional printer,” she said.

This year’s guide, she said, is “poorly designed, has excessive information and is very confusing.”

To make matters worse, the new guide gave the wrong dates for four of the seven holidays (Christmas was listed as falling on Dec. 26, for example). A two-page correction mailer was sent this month, but didn’t specify what was wrong in the original one – leaving residents scratching their heads all over again.

McGovern said they should have gotten the dates right the first time and go back to the traditional calendars. “Someone…thought they were being more efficient,” he said, referring to the Department of Public Works and Transportation. “But they weren’t. I think it was a solution in search of a problem.”

Ron Snyder, a spokesman for the county agency, said the agency regrets the error and the consternation the changes have caused residents.

“There is a segment of the population that can’t easily access things online,” he said. “We’re working with those people.”

Dropping the calendar from the guides was both a cost-saving and sustainability gesture, he said. Preparing and sending 243,000 guides costs about $160,000 a year out of the agency’s $193.5 million annual budget. And that doesn’t include the manpower required to manually program 115 routes into the mailings. The county believes it was the only one in the area that mailed calendars tailored to each route, he said.

“The goal eventually is to have everything online,” Snyder said. “The county promotes recycling and sustainability and we’re practicing what we ask the public to do.”

County Councilman David Marks said he’s heard from a lot of constituents upset about the change. “Many senior citizens, in particular, are not familiar with QR Codes and have expressed their support for the traditional pamphlets,” he said via email.

He said he supports going back to the old calendar system.

Snyder said the agency hopes to eventually have a system whereby residents can go to the agency’s website and print out a calendar individualized to their routes, but it’s not clear how quickly that can be programmed.

In the meantime, he said, “We’re going to take a look at all the feedback and assess how to go forward.”