Portland Apartment Recycling
14th April, 2010 - Posted by katherine - 2 Comments
Carsi has written about the recycling standards in Austin apartments, and I thought it would be interesting to compare Austin to Portland. When I went to visit my friend C-dizzle there in January, I got to see the apartment recycling practices firsthand. As you can see from the picture of a sign in her apartment complex I took, each apartment complex must have recycling for at least 5 materials, two of which must be newspaper and scrap and junk mail, the other three of which can be plastic, glass, steel, magazines/catalogs, and cardboard.
C-dizzle’s complex had all of these bins for 24 apartment units -most of which are occupied by 1 or 2 people- and C-dizzle was able to recycle everything that the city of Austin accepts.
It’s a much better standard than the weak Austin requirement that only complexes with 100 or more units must provide recycling. And more importantly, the city of Portland is fronting the moolah to provide this recycling. If Austin really wants to meet its zero waste plan by 2040 (http://austincitytx.us/sws/zerowaste.htm), it may need to consider options like this to really make apartment recycling a reality.
Posted on: April 14, 2010
Filed under: Uncategorized
2 Comments
Greening Austin Daily » Apartment Recycling in Austin
April 28th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
[...] From listening to my friend’s experiences at their current apartment complexes, the general consensus is what you would probably expect – people don’t recycle as much if the recycling containers at their complex are kept far from their apartments or if their complex doesn’t offer recycling at all, and people often don’t end up recycling beyond what their complex accepts. Here’s Carsi’s review of the current apartment recycling policy, an update on city council’s consideration of the policy, and my review of the apartment recycling in Portland. [...]
City Council Expands Recycling Requirements | Greening Austin Daily
November 4th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
[...] You can read a past post about me complaining about Austin’s poor apartment recycling here, and a post about how much better Portland’s apartment recycling is here. [...]
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