2023 Event Dates & Green Guide:
We have updated our
events page with our 2023 event dates! The County will host "shred and more" events on April 29 and Sept 30, and the annual Recycling Extravaganza in July. We are also teaming up with some local partners for events in April.
2023 Green Guide postcard:
We are not publishing a fully-fledged Green Guide for 2023 but will be distributing a postcard soon with our 2023 event dates and recycling center info.
More details here.
New Year, New Pilot for Obsolete Media:
We are piloting the collection of obsolete media (audio cassette, VHS, Betamax, DVD, CD, CD-ROM, DVD-R, laserdisc etc.) at the Batavia/Fabyan Parkway Recycling Center. If you plan to bring a large quantity (50 items or more), please bring them in a box you can leave. There is no cost to bring these items. Need to digitize your media first? Check in with your public library!
Green Christmas Tree Disposal:
Ho, ho, ho! For those who celebrate, it's the season for Christmas trees. If you ha ve a natural tree or other evergreen decor, you might be wondering how to dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way. We have you covered on our revamped
Christmas tree page! If you brighten your winter with string lights, we take unwanted light strings and power cords year round at
Kane County Recycling Centers!
Aurora Recycling Pop-Up, February 4:
The e-Works box-truck & staff will be collecting a full complement of recyclables, including electronics (fees for TVs and computer monitors), clothing and textiles, cardboard, books, paper, scrap metal, obsolete/unwanted media, aerosols (fee applies) in the parking lot in front of the Ace Hardware at 994 N. Lake Street from 9am - noon on Saturday, February 4th . See more about item acceptance and fee items on our
Centers page. The pop-up will continue on this schedule (first Saturdays) until further notice. Future dates are March 4 and April 1.
Blackberry Township Hauling:
Following the passage of a ballot measure in June, unincorporated Blackberry Township will be receiving franchised residential curbside waste and recycling collection, beginning the week of November 1. For more information, please see our
new webpage about the transition.
Recycling Center Tour:
Staff and Board Members recently toured a Chicago-area materials recovery facility (MRF), a.k.a. a site where single stream recycling is sorted and sold on for recycling. We wrote about our experience in
Kane County Connects (along with some tips on how you can help things go smoothly!). We also have some short video clips of the machinery in action up on
YouTube.
Additions to our A-Z List:
There are now drop off locations in Kane County for recycling bike tires and inner tubes, sports/performance nutrition product wrappers, and hard hats. There's also an additional location in the north collecting Styrofoam. Check out these items and many more on our ever-growing
A-Z Recycling Guide.
New Aerosols page:
We recently got a great question about why we charge a dollar per aerosol can to recycle at the
Fabyan Recycling Center and our
events when the
Recycling Guidelines poster shows that aerosol cans can go in the curbside recycling bin. What gives? The short answer is that there are aerosols that are safe to recycle curbside if they are emptied properly, and there are aerosols that should never be disposed of curbside.
Our new page explains!
Temporary restrictions still in place at Naperville HHW facility:
Due to a fire at a state processing facility, the Naperville HHW drop-off (open to all IL residents) has temporarily restricted its list of accepted items. See our
Kane County Connects coverage here. Our
webpage about the site has been updated to reflect these changes, but we encourage you to visit the
facility website directly and/or call (630) 420-6095 during normal business hours for the most recent updates.
Updates to our paint and medication disposal pages:
Following many calls and emails about paint disposal and recycling, we've made some updates to our
paint recycling page, including a
new map of local drop-off sites taking various types of paint. Over on the
medication page, we updated our list of public agency medication drop-offs and provided links to maps of drop-offs for different parts of the County.
New Food Waste Prevention webpage:
Inspired by her participation in the
Wasted Food Action Alliance, the Kane County Recycling Coordinator has developed a
new page on preventing food waste. It's all about keeping good food out of the landfill and on our plates!
All about Wish-Cycling:
There are several new resources out about "wish-cycling." Wish-cycling is when people put items that can't be recycled into recycling bins. Kane County's new resources include a
new flier (2 pages) and a slightly
longer guide (6 pages). Also, the IL Task Force for Recycling Contamination Solutions, in which Kane Co. participates, recently put out a two-minute PSA on wish-cycling.
Watch it here!
Battery, bulbs & sharps page updates
We get a lot of calls about how to recycle batteries and light bulbs and it can be confusing because there are so many different types these days and it isn't always easy to tell them apart. Sharps pose another issue for home users who rely on them to deliver medicine. To provide the best info possible we overhauled
our battery page,
light bulbs page, and
sharps disposal page. Check out the handy
batteries and bulbs interactive map.
