NORWAY – Oxford County Regional Solid Waste Corp. has installed less wordy signs on all its dropoff containers.

The new metal signs include at-a-glance graphics, and list only what can be placed in the container, instead of what cannot.

“All of our older signs had ‘do nots’ on it, listing both what you could do and what you could not do,” said Marie Bartlett, the corporation’s part-time educational director. “It became very wordy.”

The removable signs were made by Ross Swan of Swan’s Screenprinting in Greenwood, and are now in use by all of the corporation’s 18 towns. They are reusable, and will last much longer than the old mylar signs, which had to be scraped off and replaced each time a dropoff container was refurbished, said Warren Sessions, the corporation’s manager.

Another user-friendly improvement is the elimination of the term “mixed paper,” Bartlett said.

When the corporation was formed in 1991, that term “was used as a catch-all” for paper products like cracker and cookie boxes, milk, juice and egg cartons, or six-pack containers. It also included wrapping paper and envelopes, shoe boxes and greeting cards, pizza boxes and paper towel and toilet paper cores.

But because the word “paper” was in the title, many people were confused, and put any kind of paper in the container, even newspapers.

Actually, Bartlett said, a more precise term is “non-corrugated cardboard,” which means just that – anything but cardboard boxes, with their distinguishing ribbed construction.

A new category has been created called “office/computer paper,” to separate out office, computer and copier paper, adding machine tape and the like.

New blue brochures have been created to correspond to the new signs, Bartlett said.

The corporation recently received a state grant of $14,300 to pay for 10 new dropoff containers to restock inventory after the town of Livermore became a member. Sessions said the containers take quite a beating over time as they are trucked back and forth from participating transfer stations and other locations.

The containers need to be refurbished and repainted every five years.

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