Phoenix residents fight for recycling
Decades-old law excludes apartments, activists say
With Phoenix’s apartment-building boom, some renters are getting VIP treatment when it comes to recycling. Rather than haul used bottles, cans and papers to a dumpster, they simply put it on their front doorstep. A valet service does the rest. The convenience is available to those on the fortunate end of what sustainability advocates say is a troubling disparity for recycling in the nation’s sixth-largest city.
Where a person lives in Phoenix often determines whether they have access to recycling at home.
Residents of new apartment and condo complexes often have recycling bins on-site if they don’t get the valet service. Homeowners get blue curbside bins from the city for a flat rate.
But for tens of thousands of people living in apartments, typically in older or less-affluent communities, access to recycling is an out-of-reach luxury.
Environmental activists and some residents say the root of the inequity is a city ordinance created decades ago. The ordinance generally prohibits Phoenix from picking up trash and recycling at most apartment complexes and commercial businesses.
The city has more than 17,000 apartment complexes. Landlords can hire private waste haulers to provide recycling, but many do not, because it can cost more than basic trash service.
Andy Brown is among the city’s recycling have-nots. For almost six years, he has lived in a historic downtown building that doesn’t have recy-
cling collection, and the lack of service has forced him and his neighbors to get creative with their trash.
Throwing good recyclables away isn’t an option they like, so they wait for city garbage day. They scout the area to see which nearby homeowners have extra space in their blue curbside bins, and they pounce.
Brown said tenants have convinced the landlord to hire a private waste hauler for recycling, but he thinks the city could have fixed the problem years earlier.
“Of course, if the city was supporting it, it would have already been in place,” he said of recycling services. “It’s kind of funky that it’s not being supported by the city right off the bat.”
Like Brown, many Phoenix apartment-dwellers must use extra effort if they want to keep their recyclables out of the landfill.
Critics of the ordinance say it shouldn’t be so hard to recycle in one of the largest cities in the country. They have demanded change for years, without much success.
Phoenix leaders say the issue isn’t as simple as lifting the ban on city-provided recycling. Some City Council members have concerns about the cost of servicing apartments and the competition it would create for private waste haulers. But the push for a change continues to reverberate as the city becomes increasingly urban.
Phoenix is in the midst of an apartment-construction explosion. More than 6,960 for-rent units are under construction or planned for the downtown and central Phoenix areas, according to Apartment Insights. Hundreds more opened in recent months.
A spokeswoman for the city said at least a dozen residents who want apartment recycling typically call every month. Gripes about the city’s ban from renters are common on social media.
That demand was apparent last month as council members discussed Phoenix’s 2050 sustainability goals.
While the city has set lofty aims to decrease the amount of trash it throws in the landfill, several council members said the lack of recycling for apartments and businesses remains a sour spot.
“We shouldn’t make recycling more challenging if they choose to live in an apartment community,” Councilman Daniel Valenzuela said.
Phoenix’s ordinance states that the city generally “does not” offer solidwaste collection to customers other than single-family residential homes, townhouses and condos, mobile-home parks, non-profits and government buildings. That excludes most apartments and businesses. The city can service some smaller apartment buildings, but not those larger than 30 units.
Still, the effort to expand city-provided apartment recycling faces skepticism from some council members.
Councilwoman Thelda Williams, who chairs a council subcommittee that could recommend changes, said she’s wary of expanding waste collection into areas already served by the private market. And apartment owners and managers haven’t clamored for it, she said.
“There’s a lot of private haulers that I don’t think the city should be in competition with,” Williams told The Arizona Republic. “I would like to see more apartments participate (in recycling), but I don’t think that’s the city’s business.”
Campaign donations to city leaders from the private waste industry appear to be minuscule. In recent years, contributors who listed the city’s largest waste companies, Republic Services and Waste Management, as their employers gave less than $2,000. Williams did not receive any.
At the council meeting, Williams agreed to let her subcommittee revisit the issue at a future meeting. That is not yet scheduled, but city officials said they are preparing by studying the potential costs and logistics of expanding service.
And the city is taking a smaller step to help residents recycle in the meantime. Over the next month, Phoenix will place recycling drop-off containers in parks throughout the city. The bins, dubbed “ECO Stations,” will go in areas with large numbers of multifamily housing complexes.
While city leaders face pressure to expand recycling, multifamily residential property managers often hear the demand from renters themselves.
Downtown resident Lindsay Robinson didn’t have recycling when she moved into her garden-style complex two years ago. To avoid the guilt of not recycling, she stockpiled cans, glass bottles and other recyclables and drove them to a friend’s house to put in a curbside bin.
About a year ago, Robinson helped convince her property manager to get a recycling dumpster. Now, Robinson’s friends come over with bags and boxes filled with reusable materials. “It’s just so many obstacles in the way of doing something that should just be second nature anyway,” she said. “I think it’s frustrating because we all have this sense of responsibility to recycle.”
Robinson, 23, said the city’s ordinance needs to catch up with residents’ attitudes about sustainability, noting that many Millennials her age expect the service.
Some developers of multifamily housing projects seem to be taking the cue. The Republic surveyed 20 apartment complexes, most of them new, in central and downtown Phoenix. Seven don’t offer recycling collection, and all but one of those were constructed more than a decade ago.
Tom Simplot, a former councilman who leads the Arizona Multihousing Association, said many new apartment communities have added recycling to meet tenant demand.
Beyond the cost of hiring a waste company to provide recycling, older complexes have logistical constraints, such as limited space for dumpsters and parking. Many complexes weren’t designed to accommodate recycling.
Simplot said apartment-community managers could provide recycling more easily and cheaply if city service were an option. He said the popularity of recycling has grown so much that it’s now viewed as an “amenity just like a swimming pool and a clubhouse.”
“This is a great example of cities actually creating barriers to sustainability,” Simplot said of Phoenix’s ordinance.
Critics of Phoenix’s apartment recycling ban say the policy is also at odds with the city’s ambitious goals to improve how much it recycles overall.
The city lags many other municipalities and the national average in recycling rates, but leaders have set an ambitious goal to divert 40 percent of Phoenix’s trash from the landfill by 2020. Phoenix is at 20 percent waste diversion; nationwide, the average is about 34 percent.
Yvette Roeder, a spokeswoman for the Public Works Department, said adding recycling customers might help increase Phoenix’s waste-diversion rate, but it could have other consequences.
She said other cities that service multifamily complexes have had problems with people throwing the wrong materials in recycling bins. That kind of “contamination” can actually spoil good recyclables and increase the city’s costs for sorting materials.
Apartments can have more problems with contamination because residents’ recyclables are often commingled in a single dumpster, so it’s hard to track who isn’t recycling properly. And one scofflaw can ruin an entire community’s recyclables.
Most other large Valley cities, including Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale, Glendale and Peoria, provide recycling to apartment complexes and businesses.
In other states, it’s not uncommon for large cities to mandate recycling at some level. Minneapolis and Atlanta, for example, don’t offer recycling for apartments, but both cities have ordinances mandating that landlords provide it at every property.
Meanwhile, efforts to change Phoenix’s apartment recycling ban are still at the discussion level. More than 700 people have signed a change.org petition that was launched in 2012, calling on city leaders to amend the ordinance so it “may” offer service to apartments that need it.