My city is finally going to recycle!

Is it weird that I am excited about my city launching a recycling program? Most people already live where their community picks up recyclables. Mine will start later this year as noted on the city website HERE. My fiancee and I have been driving our plastic, metal, and glass waste to the local satellite station.

I live in Hallandale Beach, Florida and up until now recycables have only been picked up from single family residents and not condominium buildings. The city sent out a memo a few weeks back about a meeting to discuss the new and upcoming recycling program. You can look up the demographics about my city on zipskinny.com or another similar site, but let's just say I was one of the younger people there.

I guess I am so interested in this whole change for a few reasons...the obvious one being the environment doesn't place in my top 2. It's the cost savings for our trash pickup that is most important to my building's residents. For the last year we have had to pay for 6 out of 7 days for trash pickup. After I implemented an improved newspaper recycling program we were able to eliminate 1 of the 6 days. You can find my previous blog post HERE. I am looking forward to eliminating another 2 day once we get our recycling dumpster...which translates into a few thousand dollars annually. Another good reason is that I can dispose of my recyclebable waste at the end of the hall instead of a mile away.

Another benefit is that we can get rid of the 3 newspaper recycle bins that do not match. We have been putting a fair amount of money and energy into making our building look better lately and we have these 3 crappy looking bins out front. The city wouldn't give me matching ones unless the existing ones were damaged. So we had to keep the green one, the blue one, and our latest one which is dark blue.

The hardest part will be to get the residents to actually start recycling. It shouldn't be too bad as many of them think we recycle now and dispose of these containers with their newspapers. They don' take the time to read my signs. Too many words. I learned my lesson though. Signage needs to be short and sweet and in multiple languages. For us that's English, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, French, and Polish. I'm sure I missed some.

The funniest thing about the recycling meeting was all the push back from some of the other attendees. They wanted to know why the city was making them recycle and if they had to participate. And where they would store the extra dumpster. They didn't realize that they would have about 30% less waste if they actually recycled. Or that they could use this to save money. I thanked the city and I'm just excited the time to recycle is finally here.