My apartment building's put in blue recycling bins. But they're not nearly as useful as they should be. Look at some of the restrictions:

• No cans that've been in contact with food products. OK, that right there eliminates 90% of the cans I throw away.
• No glass. Most of the drinks I buy are in glass bottles, so none of that can go.
• No milk bottles. OK, that's the majority of the plastic bottles.

So what's left? The occasional plastic soda bottle. The plastic bottles I get distilled water in, that's about 2, maybe 3, a month. The advertising flyers from my mailbox. Shredded mail. Cardboard boxes. Everything else has to go in the regular trash.

If they want the recycling bins to be really useful they need to add more things:

• Clean metal cans of any sort. It doesn't take much to rinse them out.
• Clean plastic milk bottles. Same thing.
• Clean glass of all sorts.

The main problem is the "clean" part. People won't take 5 seconds to rinse out a bottle, can or jar before throwing it in the bin. That makes for a horrible mess in the bin.