The High-Rise Haul

"People need to know how they're doing," says Sampson.

by Bruce Schimmel

Some people bring their work home with them. Melissa Weigel, on the other hand, regularly found herself hauling whole bags with her on the bus — trash bags full of recycling.

"They got really heavy," says Weigel, who, after a year of shlepping reusables home to her own bin, sought help from RecycleNow (recyclenowphilly.org), a coalition credited with revitalizing curbside recycling, and which is now working on big buildings.

RecycleNow helped Weigel organize a petition drive in Constitution Place at Third and Chestnut streets. Her co-workers, she says, didn't take much convincing. "It was real organic."

Within a couple of months, building manager Carolyn Pfeiffer made the arrangements, and is now helping other buildings comply with the city's new law that requires all businesses and apartment buildings to submit recycling plans.

So by last November, Weigel was able to leave her traveling companions at the office, confident that they'd make their way into the recycling stream. But her joy is less than complete, because like so many in big buildings (nearly all of which use commercial haulers), it's difficult to figure out how well recycling is going.

That's a problem, because you can't improve what you can't measure. What's worse is that big-building dwellers are being left out of the recycling game just as it's ramping up in the neighborhoods.

The city is about to roll out incentive recycling for curbside recyclers, which will allow entire neighborhoods to track their progress. Based on tons recycled and waste saved, whole 'hoods will be awarded points that are divided among participating households. Points can be redeemed at local stores.

Some 553,000 households get curbside pickup, according to the city. But that leaves a RecycleNow-estimated 112,000 apartments in high-rise buildings that are essentially recycling in the dark. (As for the number of businesses, neither the city nor RecycleNow could offer authoritative information.)

"People need to know how they're doing," says Maurice Sampson, a recycling consultant who's worked on this very problem for the University of Pennsylvania. "That's the essence to success."

As soon as people pay attention to recycling, not only do they recycle more, says Sampson, but will also reduce their waste overall.

Now, it doesn't take a big leap of logic to conclude that waste-disposal companies might not want to make it easier to reduce waste. But Sampson says that haulers aren't entirely at fault.

Most contract-waste companies charge by the number of pickups, regardless of weight. To confound matters, haulers often combine waste from several buildings in a single truck. So determining the tons produced by a particular building is often just a rough estimate — a very rough estimate, in the case of Constitution Place. When Weigel asked about recycling stats, she got one answer. When Pfeiffer inquired, she got another. And when I called their hauling company, they declined to go on record at all.

In the civic sport of recycling, pretty soon there will be those who can keep score and those who can't. That's unacceptable. Whether the burden falls on building managers, haulers or both, there's got to be a way for everyone to get into this game.

(bruce@schimmel.com)