Auburn residents participate in their city’s curbside recycling program at a higher rate than any other city in Alabama. Nationally, 34% of residents participate in curbside recycling, compared to under 20% in Alabama. In Auburn, 84.7% do, according to Catrina Cook, director of environmental services for the City of Auburn. What led to Auburn’s success in its recycling efforts? The formula, according to Cook, is a combination of a few things: money, education, convenience and good people.
The City of Auburn first rolled out its curbside recycling program in 1987, making it the first city in Alabama to do so. For the program’s first 30 years, residents who participated in curbside recycling had to sort their recycling into different bins marked for each material. The program worked, but citizens were becoming dissatisfied with having to separate their recyclables into different containers. Auburn’s annual citizen survey showed a 4% decline in satisfaction with the curbside recycling service from 2006 to 2016.
To combat dissatisfaction and increase the recycling rate, the City introduced single-stream recycling on Dec. 4, 2017, with the help of a $288,000 grant. Single-stream recycling allows residents to place all recyclables into one container — the blue cart most households have now. Single-stream recycling is easier because it takes less work for people to throw all their recycling in one bin, and as a result, many more people joined the City’s recycling program. “The single-stream process made it very convenient,” Cook said. “Prior to that we probably had a 35-40% [recycling participation rate], and we have doubled that.”