Kickstart: What to do with all those signs now that the election is over

Now that the election is over (mostly), some communities are asking their residents to vote for sustainability by recycling their yard signs.

The OneSTL Recycling Working Group is urging people living in the St. Louis metropolitan area to separate the corrugated polypropylene signs from their metal stands and seek out a place they can take their signs for collection.

Some communities will accept the signs in curbside recycling.

As St. Louis Public Radio reports, the group first started promoting sign recycling in the spring, when people placed congratulatory signs for drive-by graduation and birthday parties in their yards and weren't sure what to do with them after the event. OneSTL renewed the call for recycling after the primary election in August and again in early November.

While we're talking politics, on Wednesday, Nov. 11, Editor Don Loepp will speak with Steve Toloken, PN assistant managing editor, during a PN Live webcast about implications of the changes in Washington.

As Steve wrote already, plastics industry lobbyists expect recycling to get increased attention under a Joe Biden presidency, but with a runoff for the two Senate seats in Georgia still to come, it's hard to predict exactly what will happen.

Wednesday's PN Live is free and starts at 2 p.m. Register here.

The City of London is counting up the results of its first year of working to become a "plastic-free city."

The pledge covers the single square mile of the official city in the U.K., but that area is home to major financial and corporate offices, representing 100,000 workers (at least in terms of a pre-COVID lockdown numbers).

Organizers said the city eliminated 620,000 plastic straws, 19 million cups, 12 million pieces of plastic cutlery, 600,000 water bottles and nearly 3.5 million food containers in estimates taken between April 2019 and March 2020.

Our sister paper Sustainable Plastics notes the Bank of England, one of the participating companies, "has embedded a 'reuse culture' within their workplace." A "think before you drink" campaign at the bank resulted in 80 percent fewer single-use plastic items being used.