Election Season is Yard Sign Recycling Season

It’s that time of year again.

The hillside is ablaze with color. All over town, they flutter in the breeze. They cluster together along every roadside. That’s right, it’s political lawn sign season.

After Election Day, most of these corrugated plastic lawn signs will end up in the landfill. Some candidates will reuse their signs from year to year, but eventually, once they become damaged or the candidate declines to run again, these signs become waste.

These plastic signs are valuable for recycling because they’re uniformly made and made from easily-identifiable resins, but they can’t be collected through the single-stream mixed recycling systems that serve your curbside recycling bin. A local specialty recycler, Replay Workshop, can collect these signs and keep them out of the landfill by recycling them into niche durable goods like tabletop game pieces and jewelry.

Based in Proctor, Replay Workshop is an arm of Atlas Games, a tabletop game publishing company. In their many years of shipping out thousands of cards, boards, books, dice, and game tokens, not to mention all the packaging for those pieces, they’ve seen a lot of plastic go out into the world. With this first-hand experience, Atlas has made it their personal mission to achieve zero waste in their warehouse operations — or even less than zero! Not only do they reduce their own waste, but they take in typically unrecyclable plastics from the community and turn them into upcycled game accessories and one-of-a-kind game components. In fact, your own plastic lawn signs could become some of these unique game pieces!

Looking to keep your lawn signs out of the landfill?

First, check with your candidate’s local campaign office to see if they plan to collect and reuse their signs. If not, you can bring your lawn signs to WLSSD’s Materials Recovery Center (4587 Ridgeview Road; check the website for facility hours and holiday closures) and drop them off for free (please separate plastic signs from their metal stakes, which can also be recycled for free at the MRC). Campaign offices are also invited to drop off disused lawn signs in bulk.

This election season, cast your vote for waste reduction by dropping off your yard signs for recycling!

And, as always, WLSSD thanks you for working to get your waste to the right place.