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If Cheverly officials have their way, town recycling will no longer be an option to residents — it will be a requirement.

The town council plans to introduce an ordinance Nov. 12 amending the code on trash collection to require its residents to sort recyclable items such as paper, plastic and glass. The meeting is at 8 p.m. at the Cheverly Community Center at 6401 Forest Road.

"Our citizens are pretty darn good about recycling, but there's always room for improvement, and there's some folks that just don't recycle," said town administrator David Warrington. "I'm an old dog. They've taught me the new tricks. There's no reason you shouldn't. There's no reason anyone shouldn't do it."

The move would benefit the environment and could save the town $20,000 annually — equal to about 400 tons of trash — in county landfill dumping fees, Warrington said. The town budgets about $120,000 to $130,000 annually for landfill dumping fees and dumps 2,400 tons of trash per year, he said. No additional staffing would be needed, but the recycling crew may have to stop more often, he said.

The council will read the ordinance a second time in December and a third time in January, which is when the council can vote on the issue, Warrington said. Resident input is encouraged, he said.

If approved in January, the ordinance will go into effect 30 days later, which would be close to Feb. 14, he said.

The ordinance would only affect the town's 1,650 single-family homes because businesses and apartments have private contracts for waste removal and recycling, he said. Cheverly's public works department picks up recyclables on Wednesdays and trash twice a week.

Recycling is widely accepted throughout the town, but there is still a minority that does not make it a regular practice, Warrington said. But most residents should not view the town's public works as the "trash police," because the ordinance would target residents with bags of trash that have large amounts of recyclable items, he said.

Public works officials will leave notes for residents whose trash bags are found with multiple recyclable items, such as after a party or gathering, asking them to sort their items and bring them back out on the following Wednesday. If residents do not comply, public works will sort their items and bill the resident.

Warrington said the bill would vary, but could be at least $100 with the time it takes to pick up the trash and sort it.

"I don't think you want to pay that employee his hourly wage to sort your recyclables," Warrington said.

Warrington said residents initially rejected the idea of required recycling when it was introduced as a ballot question in the mid-1990s but said it seems the town sentiment has changed. He said this year there has been no resident opposition so far to the idea of required recycling.

Cheverly's ordinance, if approved, would save the town money that could go toward other projects such as bike trails and tree plantings and will make other residents aware of just how many recyclable items they have when they buy food, resident Clareen Heikal, 65, said.

Heikal, a member of grassroots activist group Progressive Cheverly, attended the Oct. 8 town hall meeting where she expressed her support of required recycling. She said the majority of her neighbors recycle.

"We just have to keep things out of the landfill and just try to recycle cans and things that don't biodegrade in a landfill," Heikal said.

All counties are mandated to recycle 15 to 20 percent of their waste depending on their populations, Dawn Stoltzfus, spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of the Environment said. However, she believes Montgomery County is the only county in the state to make business recycling mandatory.

Prince George's County has not moved toward mandatory recycling because they have either reached or maintained the goal of a 35 percent recycling rate since 2001, and because the county would have to develop a way to inspect residential trash containers, which would be unpopular with the public because of privacy issues, Linda Lowe, a spokeswoman for the county's Department of Environmental Resources wrote Friday in an e-mail to The Gazette.

"We have always believed that recycling was more successful if you could use available resources to educate the residents about the importance of recycling and encourage them to embrace the principle without making it a mandatory requirement," Lowe wrote.

E-mail Natalie McGill at nmcgill@gazette.net.