Funding from Fairfax County’s plastic bag tax helped a community in the Northern Virginia suburb secure hundreds of covered recycling bins for free.

A private company manages the waste services in the Audubon Estates neighborhood, and the company isn’t providing bins or carts. So, the community’s recycling has largely been collected from bins or other objects that aren’t covered.

When it was windy, items would blow into the street or into nearby Little Hunting Creek. In some cases, animals would search what was inside.

Covered bins were available for the residents to buy, but Josie Valdez, the property manager, said, “Right now, we have a financial hardship here at the community itself.”

Many bought their trash cans from a thrift store.

With assistance from Fairfax County’s Department of Public Works and Environmental Services, the community received 700 of the 35-gallon carts, without having to pay for them.

“This community is low-income families,” Carla Claure, who has lived in the neighborhood for 25 years, said. “You need to choose — you want to eat, or you want to buy something?”

Each bin costs about $43, according to a county news release.

“Our job as a county, and we’re really working on this, is to go in, share our services, share what resources we have, and help connect residents with resources to address their issues,” Catie Torgersen, sustainability manager for Fairfax County’s Department of Public Works and Environmental Services Solid Waste Management Program, said.

Initially, despite years of residents expressing concerns, the county “just couldn’t find the right way to really address it,” Torgersen said.

But then, by using funding from the plastic bag tax, “We were able to come up with kind of an improved recycling program for the facility, and help them improve recycling and reduce litter, and meet multiple needs.”

Starting in January 2022, Fairfax County introduced a five-cent tax on plastic bags. It has generated about $11 million in revenue, and the money from the program has to be used for environmental cleanup programs, pollution and litter mitigation programs and other programming about reducing environmental waste.

“We had community members that were willing to help their neighbors learn more about recycling,” Torgersen said. “They’ve already done a lot of outreach there, and we had a property manager who is very willing to help get that message out too, and work with the collector.”

The new bins are making things “equal,” Claure said, “because now everybody has the opportunity to make a good job and save money, and have a very good quality life. No trash, it’s clean. That’s good for the people, for the health and for the environment too.”

The community, Valdez said, is providing residents with a sticker explaining what can and can’t be recycled with the new bins.

Those details are in both English and Spanish, which Valdez said is essential because, at a Maryland property she previously worked at that was about 90% Hispanic residents, “no one knew how to recycle, and I was the first property to recycle. My vision was always to bring that same process to Virginia.”

The neighborhood is handing out 10 to 20 of the containers at a time, and Valdez is expecting the process to be finished soon.

The Audubon Estates project is one of 12 that revenue from the plastic bag tax is funding, the county said.

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