NEWTON ? Jill Rowland admits her crime she threw away baby formula cans and a shampoo bottle.

She just can’t believe that she and four other Newton residents were hauled into municipal court and fined Thursday for violating the city’s mandatory recycling law.

Rowland, 26, a mother of one, was fined $50.

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “They don’t want to worry about the bigger issue of drugs, but they worry about a pop can in the trash.”

The Newton residents are believed to be the first Kansans taken to court for failure to recycle, according to two groups that track recycling programs in Kansas.

All pleaded no contest and will be fined $25 per violation, with warnings that they face stiffer fines or possibly five days in jail if they are caught with recyclables in their trash during the next six months.

Add $30 in court costs, and most of the families will owe about $100 for not recycling.

Newton has a large backlog of such cases that it plans to prosecute, city engineer Suzanne Loomis said.

Only seven communities in Kansas require residents to recycle. All are in Harvey County, where the County Commission passed a resolution two years ago banning certain recyclables from the trash transfer station.

The county does not fine residents. Instead, it requires any trash truck drivers caught dumping recyclables on the transfer station floor to pick the cans, bottles and papers out of the trash. In most communities, the trash companies refuse to pick up the trash if residents don’t recycle, said Craig Simons, the county administrator.

But in Newton, where city crews pick up the trash, the city passed an ordinance fining residents up to $100 for each day they fail to recycle.

The ordinance in part helps save taxpayers money, city officials said. The more residents recycle, the less the city has to pay to get rid of the trash its crews pick up.

The city has reduced the amount of garbage it throws away by 20 percent in the two years since recycling became law, Loomis said. Between 90 to 95 percent of residents now recycle.

Loomis said those being taken to court have repeatedly failed to recycle.

“It comes to a point of how else do you get through to people,” Loomis said.