Who Says Old Campaign Signs Are Useless?

The voters decided the winners and losers of Election Day weeks ago, and the victors have celebrated. But some loose ends remain to be cleaned up, literally, in the aftermath of the long political campaign season: those red, white and blue campaign signs that adorned many a lawn and window.

But D.C. officials don't want you to just throw them away, like obsolete artifacts. Please, recycle.

By law, all political campaign signs must be removed by today, 30 days after the election.

The D.C. Department of Public Works has set up campaign poster recycling bins at the Reeves Center, 2000 14th St. NW, and is accepting campaign posters at the Reeves Center loading dock on U Street NW, between 14th and 15th streets. Director William O. Howland wants residents to bring their yard signs -- and candidates to collect their placards -- and place them in the special recycling bins, "so these materials can be reused instead of remaining in our landfills," he said in a statement.

For those feeling more creative, old plastic campaign signs can be used to build a solar heater or a birdhouse, George Hawkins, director of the city Department of the Environment, said in a statement. (Hawkins did not provide the instructions but said they could be found online.)

"If you still have election materials lying around, recycling them is the best thing to do," Hawkins said.

Campaign signs are among the materials the city is collecting for recycling as it expands its program to cover a range of new items, including plastic bags, lawn furniture, plastic toys and plastic flower pots. The move makes the District among a growing number of municipalities that are expanding the kind of materials they collect for recycling.

The changes have been in place for more than a month, and officials are waiting for data to see whether the amount of recyclables collected, measured by weight, has increased. Hallie Clemm, a deputy administrator in solid waste management administration at the Public Works Department, said some of the newer items eligible for recycling are heavier, "so we should know what we're collecting and whether or not the new program is catching on."

The District is not incurring extra costs to collect the additional materials, Clemm said. After residents place recyclables at the curb, city workers gather them on a separate truck, and the loads are combined onto a tractor-trailer and moved to a processing facility in Maryland. The processor, Waste Management, sorts the materials by type, puts them in bales and loads them onto tractor-trailers bound for factories and mills to be remanufactured.

The demand for more kinds of recyclable material has grown, said Joe Truini, a reporter with Waste News, a weekly trade publication for the solid waste industry. With increased market demand, cities such as the District are able to collect more recyclable materials.

"They have to have the market and the end use for them," Truini said. "There's no use in collecting it if no one's going to use it."

The increased demand for grocery store plastic bags and dry cleaner bags comes from plastic lumber companies that want as much raw material as possible, Truini said. The companies make plastic decking and fences as an alternative to wood. "There aren't a lot of cities that collect it," Truini said of the District's expansion to include plastic bags.

"It's a somewhat newer material, and the demand has been increasing," he said.

The Department of Public Works did a study last fall to see how households in the city manage their waste, and how much material that is thrown away could be recycled. The agency randomly sampled 56 trash loads and 33 recycling loads. The city's residential recycling rate in fiscal 2007 was 17.6 percent, meaning that residents threw away roughly five times as much material as they recycled.

According to the same study, about 22 percent of what is thrown away could be recycled, and mixed paper and metal were materials that could prove useful if people got more information about recycling them.

According to agency figures, city residents are standouts in terms of other materials. D.C. residents recycle newspaper at a rate of 73 percent, compared with the national average of 55 percent.

Clemm said the agency plans to send more information to homes reminding residents about the recycling program, and is looking to expand translation of its message in other languages.

The city has compiled information about recycling, including a video, at http://www.recycle.dpw.dc.gov.