Apartment recycling ordinance developing

By Katelyn Weisbrod
[email protected]

After years of apartment residents demanding recycling, the Iowa City City Council will soon vote whether to provide a solution.

Members from the city staff are drafting an ordinance that could require landlords and apartment owners to provide recycling services for their tenants. The ordinance will be voted on by the City Council in the next few weeks.

“We’ve been talking about this for a while, and this is definitely a No. 1 concern from the public,” said Jen Jordan, the city recycling coordinator.

The city currently provides recycling pickup to single-family homes and apartment complexes containing four units or fewer. However, larger apartment complexes, which constitute around 12,000 households in Iowa City, are not required to take care of tenants’ recycling.

The ordinance would require property owners to hire private companies to pick up containers containing recyclables — the city would not provide this service to apartments as it does for other residences.

Jordan said adding recycling services to apartment complexes would cost a negligible amount — about $2.57 per unit per month.

This figure came about after the city held a pilot recycling program in 2012. The program sampled five apartment complexes to determine some of the costs and limitations of requiring recycling for apartments.

“The pilot project was the concrete information we needed to make this move, which has primarily come from the push from students and apartment dwellers that want the service,” Jordan said.

The push from students living in apartments has made a huge difference, said Evan McCarthy, the chief of staff for the University of Iowa Student Government. McCarthy helped create a petition asking City Council to require recycling services for apartment tenants while he served as the UISG council liaison last year.

“Whenever we tried to reach out to landlords, we got stonewalled,” McCarthy said. “So we decided to focus on the City Council when it became clear the landlords weren’t interested in jumping on board.”

McCarthy believes the new liberal council will pass the ordinance.

Mayor Jim Throgmorton, part of the progressive “Core Four” coalition that swept the council election in November, said he looks forward to seeing a draft of the ordinance.

When the council does pick up the ordinance, McCarthy said UISG would try to bring students who care about recycling to the meeting to show their support. The UISG survey and petition showed most students would be willing to pay the few extra dollars every month to have recycling in their apartments.

“Everything we’ve heard from students has been overwhelmingly positive,” McCarthy said. “We will come and advocate for it. When you get people in the room talking about things they care about, that speaks volumes to the City Council.”