A city-wide Styrofoam recycling event is coming to Naperville next month.
On Aug. 10, anyone wanting to get rid of the styrene plastic products often used for packaging, insulation and crafts can drop them off from 9 a.m. to noon at Frontier Sports Complex at 3380 Cedar Glade Drive so they can be repurposed rather than sent to a landfill.
The event is being sponsored by the Naperville Noon Lions Club and the Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force.
Donatable items include rigid Styrofoam packaging, containers and shipping padding — think the foam used to package fragile items like glassware or electronics, for instance — as well as clean Styrofoam food cups, clamshells and meat trays. Products that won’t be accepted include packing peanuts and blue building insulation or any items that are dirty or food contaminated.
All of the items collected will be taken to the Dart Container facility in North Aurora, which offers foam recycling.
The event has been in the works for the past few months, according to Jim Woodring, co-chair of social services for the Naperville Noon Lions Club.
A local chapter of the service organization Lions Clubs International, the Naperville Noon Lions Club was founded in 1948. Its mission is to help people with vision, hearing or diabetes needs. For example, it provides eye examinations and hearing screenings to people who could not otherwise afford that kind of care.
But how did recycling Styrofoam get on the club’s radar?
The idea was inspired by a local church that held its own, smaller-scale Styrofoam collection drive earlier this year, Woodring said. The church event showed Woodring that people were willing to recycle Styrofoam products if given the opportunity and that more could be done locally.
Woodring added that while not necessarily the local chapter’s primary mission, sustainability is a cause that Lions Clubs promotes at an international level.
Styrofoam products are not included in Naperville’s curbside recycling program. The city has directed residents should taken items to the Dart facility, according to Ben Mjolsness, Naperville’s sustainability manager.
With their recycling event in August, the Naperville Noon Lions are hoping to not only have a good showing but also demonstrate to the city that Styrofoam recycling be made more of a priority locally.
“This is kind of a demonstration project to see if there’s any interest in collecting and recycling Styrofoam (here),” Woodring said.
Mjolsness said that he’s “really impressed that they went ahead and put together this event,” and that he’ll be in attendance on Aug. 10 “to see how it goes.”
‘We’re going to see what the demand is. … If it’s a really popular event, we always want to make sure we’re meeting our stakeholders’ needs and residents’ needs,” he said. “So if there’s a route for us to take that makes sense from a cost and staffing perspective and (that) makes it a little bit easier for people to recycle those harder-to-recycle items, we are definitely interested in looking at all the options.”
More information about the Styrofoam recycling event can be found at napervillenoonlions.org.
