Cleveland Heights, Ohio—The City of Cleveland Heights has begun rolling out new refuse and recycling carts for residents as it officially launches its new automated “single-stream” collection service.
The 96-gallon trash carts and 64-gallon recycling carts began arriving at residents’ homes on April 11th and will continue through early May. Both carts come with wheels for easy maneuvering and attached lids to keep trash and recyclables dry and secure.
Trash should be placed in bags, which then should be placed in the refuse cart. With the city’s new recycling program, however, residents no longer need to sort and bag their recyclable items. Instead, they should place all recyclable items loosely into their new blue recycling carts. The recycling carts replace the blue and clear plastic bag system Cleveland Heights has used for residential recycling.
The blue recycling cart was funded in part by grants from the Recycling Partnership and the Ohio EPA. The City applied for and received a grant from The Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit organization that works with city governments nationwide to transform their recycling programs. Cleveland Heights was selected to receive grant support because of its dedication to advancing recycling throughout its community. The grant from The Recycling Partnership helped pay for Cleveland Heights’ new carts and for education and outreach about the new collection process.
Cleveland Heights asks that residents continue to do their part by placing only recyclable materials in their carts. This includes glass bottles and jars, aluminum and steel cans, food and beverage cartons, paper products (including newspapers and flattened cardboard), and empty plastic bottles and jugs. To help limit contamination, residents are asked to give recyclable containers a quick rinse and then place them directly into their recycling carts—no sorting needed.
Some items that cannot be recycled include plastic bags, paper towels, pizza boxes, electrical equipment, batteries, and clothing. These items often get mixed into recycling carts because of “wishcycling”—the hope that something can be recycled. Including non-recyclable items in one’s blue recycling cart may lead to all the cart’s items being sent to a landfill and can increase the city’s costs.
About The Recycling Partnership
“At The Recycling Partnership, we are solving for circularity. We mobilize people, data, and solutions across the value chain to unlock the environmental and economic benefits of recycling and a circular economy. We work on the ground with thousands of communities to transform underperforming recycling programs and tackle circular economy challenges. We work with companies to make their packaging more circular and help them meet their climate and sustainability goals. And we work with government to develop the policy solutions that will address the systemic needs of our residential recycling system. Since 2014, the nonprofit change agent diverted 500 million pounds of new recyclables from landfills, saved 968 million gallons of water, avoided more than 500,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, and drove significant reductions in targeted contamination rates. Learn more at recyclingpartnership.org.”
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