The City of Akron and Keep Akron Beautiful Launch Another Round of Recycle Right Campaign
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~ The City of Akron, in partnership with Keep Akron Beautiful, is launching the Recycle Right campaign to improve the quality of recycling in curbside carts. The initiative will run from June 5th to August 4th and will involve specially-trained personnel conducting curbside cart observations. Residents who have contaminants (non-recyclables) in their recycling carts will receive informational "Oops" tags on their carts with direct feedback designed to improve recycling cart contents.

Mayor Horrigan commented on the benefits of proper recycling, saying "We all know the benefits that recycling properly can provide to our environment. But when we aren't recycling the right items, it actually hurts our recycling program, making it unsustainable and unhelpful to the environment. Each year, this campaign helps educate our residents on what items belong in their recycling carts, and it's helping us keep our program sustainable for our city and our environment. We're also looking forward to offering glass drop off locations very soon to further help keep contaminants out of our recycling streams. We expect to launch that program in late July."

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Before the City began the Recycle Right campaign in 2019, the contamination rate of Akron's recyclables was 39.3%, which is high. This rate cost the City $205,031 in contamination costs. After two rounds of the Recycle Right campaign, however, this rate dropped down to 26.3%, bringing contamination costs down to $38,038 in 2020. The most recent audit confirmed that this program has been successful so far; showing that Akron's contamination rate for recycling is now at 22.3%. This year, Akron hopes to further improve this rate with a goal of 15% or less.

Keep Akron Beautiful CEO Jacqui Ricchiuti said "The Recycle Right Campaign is intended to increase the amount of quality recyclables in our recycling stream...The cleaner our recycling stream, the more sustainable the program will be." To help take any guesswork out of what can or cannot be recycled, residents can download a free app called Akron Recycles which allows them to search any item and find out if it belongs in the trash bin or not.

The City of Akron encourages residents to participate in this initiative as it helps create a more sustainable future for everyone involved while also reducing contamination costs for everyone involved as well!

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