Curbside Recycle Right Program

About the Program

Category: Civic Education and Public Information (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

Montgomery County’s Recycle Right campaign improves the quality of recycling by decreasing contamination and increasing recycling by single-family residents, using an effective mix of education, training, and enforcement to change behavior, as demonstrated through measurement and data. Montgomery County, MD is responsible for collecting recyclables using a dual-stream recycling system from over 220,000 single-family homes in the non-municipal portions of the County. Over time, there had been an increase in the level of contamination, or materials that are not recyclable, that residents put into their recycling bins. These contaminants or unacceptable items must be separated from the acceptable recyclable materials at the County’s Recycling Center and then disposed as waste. This issue has required added efforts to address, reducing the Recycling Center’s capacity to process and sort recyclables, and causing the need for the County to pay for and export materials it is unable to process itself to a private recycling facility for processing. In turn this had reduced the amount of high-quality recyclable materials the County markets and sells to manufacturers to use to make new products from the recyclable materials. This Recycle Right initiative includes baseline sorting and multiple measurements of materials collected from single-family households; visual inspections of materials in recycling bins set out for recycling; tagging to flag contaminant items inappropriately placed in recycling bins; education and outreach on proper recycling; and sorting and measurements of results. The highly successful Recycle Right initiative has dramatically and significantly reduced the contamination of recyclables.