Public education makes a city recycling program profitable: PMM Insight

The city of Akron, Ohio, implemented the Recycle Right public education program to curb costly contamination in the recycling stream. It's been so successful, it cut nearly $200,000 in costs and is now turning a profit, setting an example that other municipalities should notice.

PMM editors Ron Shinn and Lynne Sherwin, who both live in Akron, have seen its success from their own front yards, and discuss it in this episode of PMM Insight.

Transcript

RS: The weakest link in the plastics recycling chain has always been initial collection and sorting of discarded plastic.  

Today I am talking with Lynne Sherwin, managing editor of Plastics Machinery & Manufacturing. The January issue includes a commentary Lynne wrote about an inexpensive program that has shown remarkable results in getting residents to put only the correct materials into their curbside recycling bins. 

Lynne, please describe the program. 

LS: Anyone who has made the effort to recycle knows that each municipality is different, there are a lot of rules, and sometimes those rules change. Right now, the city of Akron, Ohio, where you and I both live, accepts four kinds of items in its curbside recycling carts: plastic bottles made of #1 PET and #2 HDPE, paper and cardboard, metal cans, and cartons from things like juice boxes or soup. They don't accept film (although you can take that to the grocery store for recycling). They also don’t take things like Styrofoam and clamshell packaging.  

Broken glass doesn’t play well with the city’s sorting equipment, so glass is now collected in bins placed in public spaces.  

While many residents are enthusiastic about recycling, the city was running into trouble with contamination because people were putting the wrong things in the bin, like glass, greasy pizza boxes, garden hoses and whatnot, or they were putting their recyclables in bags, which used to be required, but not anymore with the current sorting system. The contamination rate was over 39% and that was costing the city more than $200,000 a year in contamination costs.  

So the city and the nonprofit Keep Akron Beautiful launched a program five years ago called Recycle Right. It’s based on a national model created by the Recycling Partnership, which provided funding for the first year along with the Ohio EPA. The Recycling Partnership helped the city put it into action.  

Jacqui Flaherty-Ricchiuti, CEO and executive director of KAB, told me how it works. 

Staffers from KAB, who are trained and paid, fan out across the city on collection days for 12 weeks every year, poking around in the bins at the curb and putting an informational tag on those that contain non-recyclables.  

There’s also a marketing campaign and other educational efforts. Jacqui said KAB has fielded hundreds of questions from residents.  

RS: How did the residents of Akron take to people rooting around in their bins? 

LS: In the beginning, not well. Recycle Right launched in 2019, and then the second year was during covid when everyone was home and stressed out, which didn’t help. Jacqui said there were death threats left inside carts, people calling their council reps to complain, someone threw a dirty diaper at her. I saw a lot of complaints on Nextdoor, people swearing they’d never recycle again. 

And this was all because of what Jacqui called “oops tags.” They aren’t citations, there’s no fine involved. But something about them just rubbed people the wrong way. 

Jacqui says it’s better now after five years of the program. People know what’s going on and know the inspectors are coming. The KAB folks do a lot of educating right on the street, where people see the inspectors out there and often they’ll willingly and politely move nonrecyclables to the trash bin. As Jacqui told me, people generally want to do the right thing. 

RS: Has the program been successful? 

LS: Spectacularly. Despite the pushback, the contamination rate dropped from 39 percent to 28 percent in the first year, which Jacqui said were "really, really big numbers for the partnership.” Representatives from the Akron program were invited to speak at the Recycling Partnership’s national conference, and the Ohio EPA is also planning to spotlight the effort. 

The grants ended after the first year, but seeing success, the city took over funding, and as of October 2024, the contamination rate was all the way down to 12.5 percent. 

At that point in the year, when they released those figures in October, the city had spent about $8,000 on contamination costs. Remember they were spending more than $200,000 five years before. On top of that, because the recyclables were cleaner and therefore more valuable, they had generated more than $21,000 in revenue. That means approximately $13,000 in profits went back into the program. So it’s become self-sustaining. It’s really amazing what just a little education can do. 

RS: I am fairly careful about what goes into my recycling bin, but to be completely transparent, I carelessly threw in a forbidden item and received a tag of shame for it. That happened five years ago during the first week of the program and I have been especially careful ever since.  

LS: I’ve never been tagged! I feel kinda bad for my poor husband who has to deal with me looking over his shoulder every time he puts something in the blue bin. 

RS: Improving sorting can lead to increased collection, which improves the entire plastics recycling system. 

Thank you Lynne for telling us about how Akron reduced recycling bin contamination. 

You can read Lynne’s column in the January issue and online at plasticsmachinerymanufacturing.com. Consider passing it along to anyone in your community who might be interested in improving their recycling program.