How to Start a Recycling Program in Your Community

Recycling is one of the best things we can do to protect our environment, but it’s a team effort. Getting your community interested in recycling helps reduce waste in nearby landfills and conserve crucial natural resources. If you want to make a difference, everyone needs to play a part.

Starting a recycling program can help you get everyone in your community involved. Educating community members and providing simple recycling options encourages everyone to do their part.

Learn more about how you can start a community recycling program that makes a difference in your community.

What Is a Recycling Program?

A recycling program is an initiative that encourages people to recycle by educating them and offering helpful recycling resources. Recycling programs can be a community-wide effort, but they’re also common in offices and other businesses.

Here are some of the ways recycling programs reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills:

Educating people about what can be recycled and how to recycle
Providing convenient recycling options, including curbside bins and recycling centers
Helping people understand how their recycling effort affects the environment

The Long Beach recycling initiative is spearheaded by the city’s Environmental Services Bureau (ESB), and we’re dedicated to supporting that initiative.

What Makes Recycling Programs Work?

Starting a community recycling program isn’t as simple as asking your community to recycle. If you want to get everyone in your community involved, it’s important to simplify recycling with education and resources. Let’s look at what makes recycling programs successful.

Convenience

If you want to convince your community to recycle, you need to offer convenient recycling options. It’s not that people don’t want to recycle — it’s just that people aren’t always willing to expend a ton of effort on something new. When you provide convenient options like curbside recycling and clearly marked recycling bins in homes and businesses, everyone can get involved with minimal effort.

Our recycling center makes it easy to recycle everything from scrap metal to paper and plastic, and we offer our services free of charge. We also offer collection equipment that makes it even easier to recycle.

Community support

Whether you’re trying to clean up a local park or encourage your community to recycle, you need support from your community. If your community doesn’t support your recycling program, it’s going to be hard to get people involved.

Communicating with community leaders and members can help you design a recycling program that your community supports. You can iron out all the little details to make sure you’re creating a recycling program that works for everyone.

Persistence

It’s difficult to make a difference overnight, especially with recycling. You might not get everyone in your community involved on day one, but people will start to come around with enough time and encouragement. The more you educate your community about how easy it is to recycle, the more people you can get involved.

You can also try giving people an incentive to recycle. At Corridor Recycling, we pay you for your recycling so you can protect the planet while putting some extra cash in your pocket. As a community recycling program manager, you can partner with local businesses to offer gift cards and other benefits to people who participate in your program.

How to Start a Recycling Program

Are you ready to start a recycling program in your community? Check out this step-by-step walkthrough for starting a recycling program.

1. Perform an audit

Start by performing a waste audit to figure out how much and what type of waste you’re generating. You can send out a survey to community members asking them how many paper, plastic, cardboard, and metal recyclables they throw away on a weekly or monthly basis.

2. Find out what you can recycle

Once you’ve figured out what type of waste your community is generating, you can determine what’s recyclable and what’s not. Your community recycling program should target the recyclable materials your community generates most, whether that’s plastic containers or paper and cardboard.

3. Use designated recycling bins

Now that you know what you’re going to recycle, you can focus on providing convenient solutions for your community. Offer designated recycling bins for the various materials you’re recycling. You can set up free community recycling bins in parking lots and other frequently visited areas.

You can also help community members sign up and get started with curbside recycling to jumpstart your recycling initiative.

4. Educate

As simple as recycling seems, there are rules about what’s recyclable and what you have to do before recycling various items. Educate your community about emptying and rinsing liquid containers and removing non-recyclable materials from recyclable plastic and cardboard containers.

5. Monitor your recycling program

Now that your community recycling program is underway, monitor the results to see how many people are recycling. Analyzing your recycling program helps you figure out what you need to change to make it more efficient.

Getting Your Community Involved

Getting everyone involved in your community recycling program isn’t always easy. Here are some tips you can use to encourage your community to get involved:

Offer discounts and other incentives to people who recycle
Connect with local newspapers or stations to spread the word
Make sure people have access to free public recycling bins

Keep in mind that some communities are naturally more receptive to recycling programs and green initiatives.

Simplify Recycling at Our Long Beach Recycling Center

Starting a community recycling program is a great way to get communities of all sizes to recycle and protect our natural resources. If you want to start a Long Beach recycling initiative in your neighborhood or at work, we’re here to help.

Corridor Recycling offers convenient recycling solutions. You can bring all your recyclables to our Long Beach recycling center, or we can get you set up with collection bins so your whole community can recycle.