There was good news the other day for city recyclers, those responsible citizens who take seriously their belief that the Earth’s resources are finite and that landfill space is too valuable to waste.

One of our letter writers actually pushed the city into action on the recycling bins that fill up on Saturdays. Suzanne Edick described her frustration with the bins that fill up on Saturdays, but then got madder when she learned that the city was taking the bins overflowing with newspapers and plastic bottles and jugs to the landfill.

That doesn’t make any sense, she wrote.

Dave Owen, director of waste management for the city, happens to agree with her.

And as a result of Edick’s complaint, the city has decided to buy some additional recycling bins so it can avoid having to dump the full bins on Saturdays.

The problem is that the businesses that take the city’s recyclable materials - Paperstock Dealers in Madison Heights and Cycle Systems in Campbell County - are both closed on weekends. So if a bin is full, rather than let it overflow to the ground at the recycling centers, the city hauls it off to the landfill.

Additional bins would give the city more flexibility with the ones that fill up, meaning they could wait until Monday to take the full containers to the firms that recycle the materials.

Owen said residents could help the city by trying to visit the recycling centers during the week, rather than on the weekends. Short of that, residents could also help with the full containers by either returning home with their materials or going to another of the nine centers in the city.

Edick said she was happy to hear that the city took action. She added that her family recycles everything and even takes glass to Madison Heights because the city doesn’t recycle it.

There’s also some good news for glass recyclers in the city. The city abandoned recycling jars and bottles last October because there was no market for it. That meant the loss of some $9,000 a year.

But Owen says a solution to the glass problem may not be far off. Bedford County is in the process of getting into the recycling business itself, cutting out the middleman and finding buyers for its materials. The county’s material recovery facility would accept a number of recyclable items, including glass. Bids have gone out to build the new facility at the county landfill. It could be open by the first of the year.

Sheldon Cash, solid waste manager for the county, said the items accepted would include glass, which would be ground up into a sand-like material. It could then be used in roadbeds and as a base for water lines, much like gravel, he said.

What Owen and Cash and others involved in recycling are most interested in is saving landfill space. That’s the main goal of most municipal recycling programs, even though they typically lose money. The program in Lynchburg, for example, costs about $225,000 annually and brings in only $50,000 to $60,000, Owen said.

But the city estimates it saves about $150,000 worth of landfill space a year through recycling, which brings the program much closer to breaking even.

In addition to newspapers and their inserts and plastics, the city accepts corrugated cardboard, aluminum and steel cans and mixed paper.

Markets for recycled newsprint have become well established, including manufacture of the newsprint on which today’s newspaper is printed. Corrugated cardboard also does well, along with aluminum and steel cans.

The alternative to recycling is to pitch the materials in the landfill where they will take up space for hundreds of years. Don’t do that. Recyle. And when you save landfill space, you save tax dollars.