Akron Reporter

Akron, Ohio — On June 5, the City of Akron in partnership with Keep Akron Beautiful, is once again launching the Recycle Right campaign here in Akron. The Recycle Right campaign is a communitywide initiative to improve the quality of recycling in curbside carts by providing residents personalized and real-time curbside recycling education and feedback. 

The initiative—running Monday, June 5 through Friday, August 4—will again include mobilizing specially-trained personnel to conduct curbside cart observations.  Residents who have contaminants (non-recyclables) in their recycling carts will receive informational “Oops” tags on their carts with direct feedback designed to improve recycling cart contents (example available here).  Recycling carts found to contain contaminants such as trash and other non-recyclable items will not be emptied.  Instead, residents will be given the opportunity to correct the mistake and return the cart to the curb the following week. 

“We all know the benefits that recycling properly can provide to our environment,” said Mayor Horrigan. “But when we aren’t recycling the right items, it actually hurts our recycling program, making it unsustainable and unhelpful to the environment. Each year, this campaign helps educate our residents on what items belong in their recycling carts, and it’s helping us keep our program sustainable for our city and our environment. We’re also looking forward to offering glass drop off locations very soon to further help keep contaminants out of our recycling streams. We expect to launch that program in late July.”

Before the City began the Recycle Right campaign in 2019, the contamination rate of Akron's recyclables was 39.3%, which is high. This rate cost the City $205,031 in contamination costs. After the first two rounds of the Recycle Right campaign, the rate dropped down to 26.3% which brought the contamination cost down to $38,038 in 2020. The most recent audit confirmed the continuing success of this program showing that the City’s contamination rate for recycling is now at 22.3% meaning the City has nearly cut the contamination rate in half during the course of this campaign. This year, Akron hopes to further improve the contamination rate with a goal of 15% or less.

"The Recycle Right Campaign is intended to increase the amount of quality recyclables in our recycling stream," said Keep Akron Beautiful CEO Jacqui Ricchiuti. "The high-quality recyclables we want to see are paper, cardboard, cartons, metal food and beverage cans, and plastic bottles and jugs. All recyclables should be clean, dry, empty, and not bagged. Some of the most common trash items which are mistakenly put into recycling carts include bagged recyclables, plastic bags, and dirty or wet cardboard, including pizza boxes and donut boxes. The cleaner our recycling stream, the more sustainable the program will be. We hope to have a lower contamination rate with this next round of the campaign, as we educate Akronites on how to recycle properly."

To help take any guesswork out of what can or cannot be recycled, the City of Akron offers the free Akron Recycles app. The app allows residents to search any item and find out if it belongs in the trash bin, the recycling bin, or on the curb as a bulk item. The app also provides customized alerts and reminders regarding curbside pickup. It is available to download for free on Apple or Android devices.

Original source can be found here.