Getting punished for doing something wrong stinks. Getting punished for something that somebody else did is often enough to push someone into action.

That’s apparently what happened to one East Providence resident (who has asked to remain anonymous) when they received a $50 fine for improper recycling due to the presence of a prohibited plastic bag mixed in with their recycling — a charge they denied and asserted must have come from someone else putting the item in their bin.

“I didn't think it was fair that I get punished for someone else's action,” they said.

When they went to dispute their citation in municipal court earlier this month, they were joined by other residents going through the same process. After a couple of recycling citations came up for their hearings, the resident said that eventually the municipal court judge had a sidebar with an assistant city solicitor, after which everyone who was in attendance for a recycling fine was asked to go out into the lobby.

They were reportedly told that the attorney working municipal court that night was not prepared to prosecute those fines, and was unaware he would be doing so.

“So all of our violations were being dismissed,” the resident said.

The resident further said that they were told by the attorney that the fines were potentially problematic in terms of being able to be enforced, and would be the subject of further discussions within the city.

Bins sit out on the sidewalk under a blooming tree on Grosvenor Avenue on Tuesday afternoon.

How are recycling fines issued?
The ordinance creating a citation for improper recycling has been on the books for years in East Providence, but it has been pushed to the forefront since February, when Mayor Bob DaSilva made a targeted and publicized push to cut down on fees the city pays from rejected recycling loads sent to the state’s lone recycling facility, the Materials Recycling Facility, in Johnston.

According to numbers supplied by the city, East Providence has paid over $190,000 in the last three years (including $91,264 in 2024) in fees stemming from rejected loads, which occurs when loads are contaminated with more than 10% of materials that can’t be recycled (like plastic coat hangers and other rigid types of plastics, electrical components, plastic bags, disposable coffee cups, etc.).

The municipal court situation, however, brought up a few good questions about the city’s recycling citation effort. First and foremost: How can a city adequately and accurately inspect the recycling contents of over 20,000 households during recycling pickup every other week?

DaSilva said that the city receives data back when loads are rejected at the recycling center, which helps inform them about what areas of the city to focus enforcement efforts.

“Are you going to be able to hit every single [recycling bin]? No,” he said. “What we do is we look at where we had violations. We get notified by our contractor who says we had a load that was rejected because of a lot of contamination of the load. We know where that was picked up. So the following time we do recycling…we send the people out there to check that particular neighborhood to make sure that people aren’t doing it.”

And the “people” DaSilva referred to are actually just two people; one full-time employee and one part-time employee, who work in code enforcement for the city’s Department of Public Works.

DaSilva said most of the time, the violations are pretty immediately apparent.

“A lot of times a lot of these things are very obvious,” he said. “Things are sticking out of the bin that you know aren’t recyclable.”

DaSilva reiterated his belief that the issue is rooted in a lack of education about what is recyclable, and that people have a responsibility to learn those protocols.

“It’s about educating people how to do things properly, and making sure that people who are being flagrant and not following the rules are held accountable,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. And at the end of the day, I think we’re starting to see a change in the number of rejected loads. People know about it and people are being more careful.”

More enforcement personnel needed?
In regards to the batch of citations that were dismissed from municipal court earlier this month, DaSilva said that it was an isolated incident, and not an issue of being unable to enforce the ordinance in general.

“The issue we ran into the other day was that the people doing enforcement did not properly document it the way it should be documented from a law enforcement and prosecution point of view,” he said. “Not that the whole thing isn’t prosecutable. It is prosecutable.”

DaSilva said that a lack of personnel to document citations properly was a real problem.

“The personnel who are trained to properly document it, they need to make sure that every single instance has a number of photos that documents the violation, documents the barrel, and documents the location,” he said. “And after all this discussion, we’re looking to roll out a part-time code enforcement position because it is a lot of work.”

DaSilva said that the most common complaints the city receives are about code violations such as handicap accessibility, parking violations, and violations to city ordinances. He said hiring another employee to specifically look for and make these types of citations, including recycling violations, would be valuable.

“People want their communities to look nice,” DaSilva said. “People want residents and neighbors to take care of their properties and keep it looking nice, and people don’t want to be paying unnecessary fines and fees to the tune of $91,000 when that money can go towards other services. And because people aren’t being careful enough or they’re not following the rules, it’s costing taxpayers. All taxpayers.”

Mayor Bob DaSilva speaks at Providence Country Day on Friday, April 25. Fittingly enough for this story, it was at the state's 138th Arbor Day celebration. DaSilva reasoned that fines for improper recycling are a good tool that benefits the city, and taxpayers, at large.

How many fines have been issued?
For the resident we spoke to, their citation being dismissed was a small victory, but they couldn’t help but wonder how many other people had been in their shoes — where they felt improperly cited but couldn’t commit the time and energy to fight the issue in court, and so paid the fine just to be done with it.

We asked the city, and as of last week when we received the numbers, there had been 377 recycling fines issued. Of those, 287 were paid, and 14 had been disputed or dismissed. The remaining 76 have yet to be paid or challenged.

A quick calculation from those numbers reveal that the city has already raked in $14,350 from recycling fines in about two months of its concerted efforts (with potentially $3,800 more from those 76 unpaid citations).

DaSilva that money would go into the general budget, and was not earmarked for any one specific cause. He did say that the city was looking into applying for grant funding to get more recycling educational materials disseminated to all residents.

Asked about the validity of the concern that residents could be penalized for someone else throwing a prohibited item in their recycling bin, DaSilva said the system provides them proper recourse.

“In America we still have the right to due process and they would be able to go before our municipal court and make that argument, if that’s the case,” he said. “Do I think that there is a concerted group of people out there going out and throwing illegal recycling in peoples’ recycling bins? I don’t think so.”