New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has included recycling as one of three “key areas of our PlaNYC environmental and infrastructure agenda.” His recently unveiled plan calls for many residential, commercial and public space initiatives – all designed to increase recycling rates in New York.
Because CleanRiver Recycling Solutions is primarily concerned with public space recycling containers, we were curious about whether the city will have more of these. The new plan does pledge to increase the number of recycling bins in public places from 600 to 1000. While we applaud any increased opportunity to recycle in the streets, parks and subways of New York, 1,000 containers for a city of more than eight million people (not including commuters and tourists) can best be described as a starting point.
We understand budgetary restrictions. We also do not recommend deploying containers until the collection system is ready. As such, we offer a small suggestion. Concentrate the new recycling containers in high-value areas and conduct a pilot program to evaluate which containers, what types of graphic signage and how the units are deployed. The results of such a pilot study will be useful as New York grows its recycling infrastructure in the future.
A more detailed look at the New York proposal is provided by Steven Cohen, Executive Director, Columbia University's Earth Institute, in this blog post.