SEATTLE – For nearly a year, the city of Seattle has taken a get-tough attitude with its residents in an effort to get them to recycle more of their trash.
It appears to be working.
Under the program, residents are required to recycle glass, paper, cardboard, tin, aluminum and some plastics. If a trash can is set out for pickup containing more than 10 percent recyclable items, the hauler tags the can and leaves it full until the owner sorts out the recyclable items.
From January, when the program began, until September, just 1,207 cans went unemptied by haulers – out of an estimated 6 million set out for collection. That’s a compliance rate of 99.98 percent.
“We’ve had surprisingly positive reception to the ban” on recycling refuse-niks, said George Sidles, a collection manager for Seattle Public Utilities. “The city is really behind this effort.”
Businesses, which are required only to recycle paper, cardboard and yard waste, and apartment buildings that don’t comply after two warnings can be fined $50. Some have received second warnings, but none has been fined and about 95 percent have reportedly complied.
The city saves $4.4 million a year by recycling and reselling materials instead of paying to dump it at landfills, said Brett Stav, a utilities spokesman.
The city has also increased its spending on educating the public.
In the late 1990s, when the department’s education budget was less than half the $450,000 it is today, recycling dropped from 44 percent in 1995 to 38 percent in 2001. In 2003, the City Council passed a law requiring businesses and residents to recycle. Punishment for scofflaws began last January.
“We’ve made the correlation between education and recycling,” Stav said. “The less we spend on education, the less people recycle.”
The city’s overall recycling rate returned to 44 percent in 2005, and the utilities department said the city is on track to reach Mayor Greg Nickels’ goal of recycling 60 percent of its trash by 2010.
Single-family homes did best, recycling 61.4 percent of their trash in 2005. Businesses increased recycling to 46.6 percent last year.
The city’s two transfer stations – where people haul their own trash – have the worst recycling rate, at just under 18 percent last year.
The stations don’t make it easy for self-haulers to sort out their recycling, so the city is looking to rebuild the facilities, Stav said.
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