The City of Olympia received two awards this year for work on improving its recycling program. First, the Washington State Recycling Association’s “2021 Public Sector Outreach of the Year Award”. The WSRA is a nonprofit membership organization that has been dedicated to supporting waste reduction, reuse, recycling, and composting in Washington since 1976.
The second is from Resource Recycling for “Small City Recycler of the Year.” Resource Recycling is a national publication producing a Resource Recycling magazine and a national recycling conference.
Both awards demonstrated the City of Olympia’s efforts and commitment to removing glass from its curbside collection program and improving the quality of material collected. Glass is a major contaminate in commingled recycling because it embeds into paper fibers. The City’s goals and actions were to remove glass and other nonaccepted materials from its curbside collection and improve the quality and value of the material collected. Provide its customers alternative drop-off sites to bring glass for reuse and reduce the costs of transporting and processing its recyclable material.
The City used a focused approach to engage and educate its community using direct mailers, postcards, the annual collection schedule with material list, utility bill inserts, residential and commercial site visits, City website, residential Recycle Coach (a web and mobile app) and ESRI’s ARCGIS Collector App. In less than two months, the City significantly reduced the amount of glass in its comingled recycling stream.
To help residents repurpose glass, the City set up three glass drop-off sites. The City sends the glass to Concrete Recyclers as an aggregate material.
For more information contact: Ron Jones [email protected].