When Adam Cooper and Lily Brooks moved from Grand Reserve, their South Austin apartment complex, to a rental house off East Austin’s Manor Road on Aug. 1, they moved dozens of glass bottles with them. Grand Reserve didn’t offer glass recycling, and Brooks says they just couldn’t bear to throw all those bottles in the trash.
“We saved all our glass bottles from the entire year in our garage, not being able to stomach throwing them away and not really dealing with or knowing what else to do with them,” says Brooks, a photographer. “Maybe it's a little crazy, but we actually moved them with us and have been putting them out bit by bit now that we have curbside recycling.”
Beginning in October, the City of Austin will begin phasing in a multi-year universal recycling ordinance as part of Austin’s goal to become a so-called Zero Waste city by 2040, with the aim of keeping more than 95 percent of trash out of landfills largely through recycling, re-use, and composting organic matter. Austin averaged 1,456 pounds of landfilled waste per Resource Recovery customer in 2011, with only 38 percent of overall waste diverted from the landfill, meaning the City has a ways to go before meeting its goal.
The first phase of the universal recycling ordinance will require more than 4,500 commercial and multifamily properties within Austin city limits to offer recycling of office paper, plastic grades 1 and 2, corrugated cardboard, aluminum and glass. Phase 1 begins Oct. 1 and includes multifamily apartment buildings, condominiums and dorms of more than 75 units; mixed-use properties that are at least half residential; commercial properties of more than 100,000 square feet, institutional properties and private educational facilities.
Ranier Management Ltd. manages 17 multifamily communities in Austin, with a total of 1,380 residents, all of which already offer recycling, says district manager Rachel Sypho. However, she adds that recycling for all items required for Phase One compliance is not offered to all units currently.
The company spends $25 to $75 for recycling bins, depending on the size of the community, and also offers residents other sustainable alternatives like energy-efficient light bulbs, energy audits, low-flow shower heads and toilets, solar screens and even an herb garden at one community.
“As a company, Rainier has gone to great strides to stay energy efficient at all our communities city wide, we encourage the resident to go green and require they participate in the (energy-efficient) bulb program,” she says. “We constantly look for new ways to go green.”
Roscoe Properties, which manages 29 multi-family communities ranging from eight to 224 units in the Austin metro area, is already in compliance with Phase One of the Universal Recycling Ordinance, with all properties housing more than 75 units offering single-stream recycling (where all recyclables go into the same bin and get sorted further down the line), said Steven Rea, CPM®, director of training and systems development for Roscoe.
“We knew the ordinance was coming, and we’ve also had a lot of demand from our residents, who wanted the option of recycling,” Rea says. “The market drove our implementation as much as the city did.”
Rea also says that single-stream recycling services are less expensive now than they were three or four years ago, when it was cheap to offer paper recycling, but more expensive to offer glass recycling. Roscoe spends between $30 and $200 a month per community to offer its residents recycling options, he adds.
In addition to enhanced – and mandatory – recycling options, the City will also expand its organic matter collection in 2015 to include
- Providing collection carts for yard trimmings and other organics
- Adding food scraps and compostable paper to the yard trimmings collection program
- Providing a choice in the size of the containers (64 and 96 gallons)
- Expanding organics collection to residential trash and recycling pickups
Currently, the city collects yard trimmings in customer-provided bags once weekly. Since the late 1980s, the city has been using that collected material to create compost dirt, called Dillo Dirt, which is then donated to landscape public spaces and also sold to commercial vendors for sale.
As a way to get a head start on organic waste diversion, the city also offers a home composting incentive of $75 for customers who downsize to the smallest available trash container, take a home composting class and then purchase a home composting system.
Resource Recovery, the city's waste and recycling division, is still studying what impact its programs will have on overall waste reduction. Between 2010 and 2011 though, the landfill diversion rate did go up one point to 38 percent. A representative from Resource Recovery said that during planning and implementation, the department will “monitor its successes and seek out new opportunities for innovation and advancement in Zero Waste policy development.”
Most of Austin's waste ends up in this landfill. (Courtesy of imca.org.)
In the meantime, the majority of what the city collects will be sent to a landfill off FM 812 that’s owned and operated by Texas Disposal Systems (TDS). The landfill is approximately 360 acres on a TDS tract of land of more than 1,000 acres that contains the landfill, recycling, composting and ranching operations, including an “exotic game ranch” that features more than 2,000 animals.