City Seeks To Expand Recycling

In a perfect world, everything that can be reused or recycled would never make it into a landfi ll.

We live in a far-from-perfect world.

Residents of Northwest Arkansas generally have more opportunity than in the past to do what’s right for our society and the planet by recycling.

Whether it’s curbside pickup or a drop-off location a few miles a way, many residents have no real excuse for continuing to throw away items that can be reused or recycled. Most people will recycle when it’s easy, convenient and inexpensive, or at least less expensive than tossing it into a trash can. Make it too hard to understand, costly and troublesomeand human nature tends to revert to the path of least resistance. Hard-core, save-the-planet practitioners of earth-saving habits - the Ed Begley Jr. types - no doubt find that incomprehensible, but the easier it is, the more people will be involved.

City officials in Fayetteville want the next couple of years to produce significant results in their recycling program. To achieve them means attacking one of the biggest weaknesses of the city’s approach, and that’s apartments. More than half the residents of Fayetteville are renters, a characteristic one would expect for a college town. In particular, those living in apartment complexes have had to be extremely self-motivated to engage in recycling.

When you pack a bunch of people into a confi ned area - high-density infill of the type Fayetteville attempts to encourage - it’s more dift cult to develop recycling programs. It’s more common for renters to consider the disposal of trash their landlords’ problem once they haul it out to a trash bin.

Homeowners and renters of single-family homes have virtually no excuse for not recycling. The city provides up to two free bins into which plastics, newspapers, glass, cardboard, cans, and mixed paper (including junk mail) can be deposited for curbside pickup once per week. But apartment renters have long faced a dearth of options.

Apartments sometimes have little room for piling up recyclable materials, whereas house-dwellers often have garages or carports where they can be stored until weekly pickup. What tenant wants cans, cardboard, plastics and other materials piling up in their limited living space?

Likewise, there’s often not much space in apartment complexes for setting up recycling centers.

Apartment managers fear they’ll become an eyesore they can ill-afford in the constant pursuit of tenants.

When there is space for a communal recycling center, it takes only one or two uninformed people to “spoil” the recyclables of the entire complex with improper materials. High turnover in apartment residents makes education about recycling an ongoing and intensive challenge.

Fayetteville’s task is indeed a big one, but not insurmountable. With so many people living in apartments, the city will only make the kind of progress it wants by attacking that challenge. The city has made a major contribution by opening a second recycling center on North Street, a central, high profi le location. But more on-site options will prove the most effective way to divert more waste from the landfi ll.

We commend Fayetteville’s efforts, which include more permanent placement of recycling containers at more apartment complexes and development of a 10-year plan with a goal of diverting 80 percent of waste from dumping in landfi lls.

It’s a Herculean task, but for a recycling program to be more than a feel-good, symbolic eff ort, capturing more waste for recycling is a necessity.