Additional reporting by Aaron Keck

Almost all the new rolling recycling carts are in use in the municipal sections of Orange County, and rural households should be following closely.

“The commissioners did authorize the purchase of 7,000 carts for the rural area,” says Blair Pollock, a Solid Waste Planner with Orange County Solid Waste Management. “

He says there are roughly 13,700 households on the recycling route in the rural part of the county.

However, he says the big gap between the two numbers may not be a bad thing.

“A: we know that not a lot of people recycle at the curb,” Pollock says. “We know that a lot of people will bring their recyclables to convenience centers. And B: not everyone’s going to want a cart. If you have a long driveway, maybe you’d rather keep your bins. In the rural area, there’s a lot more impediments to everyone using a cart.”

He says, in order to find out how many carts are needed, a survey is being conducted in the next several weeks to ask who wants to opt in to the program.

Once the numbers are tallied, the carts will be ordered and delivered.

“We’ll get the carts ordered by November, and we’ll be able to distribute them next January and start collection around February,” Pollock says.

Pollock says that is a carefully-calculated but soft timeframe but that there are always problems that could arise.

“Can you says, ‘ice storm’,” Pollock says.

Let’s hope not.

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