If you see a City of Warwick car in front of your home, a member of the Department of Public Works might be going through your recycling.

DPW director Eric Earls said the department has been checking the contents of recycling bins around the city to keep unrecyclable materials from contaminating the recycling stream.

“There are certain areas of the city where we know that we get more rejected loads than others, and so in those areas of the city we’ll have people going out in front of the recycling trucks, lifting up the bins, checking to make sure that there’s nothing in there that’ll cause it to be rejected,” Earls said. “If there is something, they’ll push it back away from the curb so the driver knows not to pick it up, and then they’ll put a tag on it and leave a note.”

The notes left on bins with unrecyclable materials inside tell the home’s residents about what can and cannot be recycled and specifying what in the recycling bin would have caused the whole load to be rejected.

According to Earls, the city spends around $1.8 million a year in tipping fees to Johnston to take the city’s trash, but it gets to recycle for free. Each rejected recycling load, though, adds to the total of the trash number.

“Every time there’s a rejected recycling load, it costs the city about $700, and that adds up pretty quickly,” Earls said. “It’s significant, and that’s why we’re really trying to minimize that, because the landfill prices just keep going up.”

Those educational measures, Earls said, have had a positive impact, and it’s larger in the summer months than in the winter. That, Earls said, is due in large part to the DPW deploying a dedicated employee to check recycling during the summer months.

Still, Earls said, the impact year ’round is significant, and improvements tend to stick.

“It’s probably as much as a 30% or 40% reduction in rejected loads this time of year,” Earls said. “It’s tougher to quantify, but in the summer, we probably saw … as much as a 50% reduction in rejected loads. It can be pretty substantial.”

Earls also theorized that the winter months tend to have higher rates of rejected recycling due to homes producing more trash.

“This time of year, after Christmas, everybody’s throwing everything away,” Earls said. “So we really want to be on it, because, you know, if your trash bin is full, maybe you throw the stuff in the recycling bin and hope it all gets taken.”

With that in mind, Earls said, the bin-checking patrol will help save the city a bit of money in the new year.

“There are few items in the budget that are as big as getting rid of trash,” Earls said. “And so whatever we can do to minimize that, we do.”