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The City of Columbus officially launched the new city-wide curbside recycling program in March and began distributing carts to westside neighborhoods including Franklinton, The Hilltop and Westland.
The first collection day took place last Monday, June 4th, and brought in a total of 414.21 tons of plastics, glass and other reusable materials. This collection is being touted by city leaders as resulting in a $22,955 savings in landfill dumping fees.
“It was a tremendous first effort with residents filling their carts with recyclable items that two weeks earlier had been placed in the trash,” said Mayor Michael B. Coleman. “Thanks to all residents who are participating in making Columbus a greener, smarter city.”
The recycling program will continue to be rolled out to other neighborhoods in four additional phases. The delivery of recycling carts to the Phase 2 area of the south, southeast and east side neighborhoods began on June 11th with the fist day of pickup scheduled for July 31st.
The program will be fully implemented by February of 2013 and will service over 220,000 single-family households throughout the entire city of Columbus. Recycling is collected at no additional cost to residents on an every-other-week basis.
More information can be found online at www.RecycleColumbus.org.
In my neighborhood near hilliard I was the only one putting out a red bin for recycling back when I had to pay to recycle (and used a red bin). Now, at least half of my neighbors are now recycling. Big kudos to the recycling program.
Condos are apparently left out of this, and I cannot find any information when they will be included. I live in a complex where every address has its own trash bin and is picked up at the end of each driveway. I do not see how this differs from a single-family home. The city needs to include all Columbus addresses. It will only increase efficiency to pick up more in the same amount of land.
I guess I will continue to drive my recycling to the dumpsters at the fire station. Although I could see those going away with the new program.
I’m not 100%, but I believe that apartment and condo communities larger than a 4-unit building are required to establish their own waste-hauling contracts, similar to a commercial property (retail, office, etc). Which means that recycling contracts would be handled the same way.
If you want your apartment complex or condo community to provide recycling services, you should let them know. There’s already a startup company that provides solutions for this type of service:
http://www.themetropreneur.com/columbus/v-i-p-waste-services-helping-apartment-communities-recycle/
Not completely true. I’m in a 4+ unit condo association and we place our trash in 300 gallon alley cans.
In our case, I don’t understand why they can’t replace 1 out of every 3 trash cans with a similar sized recycle can… or something.
If everyone else had the kind of load we did after a month of saving up everything recyclable until the first delivery, oy! We pretty much used our bin plus some, and had it filled up 2 weeks before the first pick up. We determined that a) my husband drinks far too much pop, and thus we really need a can crusher, and b) I really need to generate far less trash. But definitely on board here, and am going to keep on trying to convince my neighbors to put their blue containers to use.