Walk into Ryan Floring’s storage closet, and you’ll find cases of empty Oberon, Angry Orchard and Summer Shandy bottles. The beer bottles, among other cans and boxes, have cluttered the closet for over a year because his apartment doesn’t offer recycling.
“Because there’s no real easy way to do it, I just don’t do it,” says Floring, a resident of Detroit City Apartments on Washington Boulevard, “so they just build up.”
Once, he left four bags on the street, where a homeless person soon picked them up. Otherwise, the 28-year-old Quicken Loans mortgage banker can’t bring himself to throw away items of value.
“When I was a kid we didn’t have a whole lot of money, so I would grab all the empty bottles from my house, cash them in and buy whatever I needed,” he says. “I saved a lot of money that way.”
While the city has ramped up efforts the last few years to offer curbside recycling for homeowners, many apartments and lofts don’t offer the service. Of 22 apartments and lofts surveyed by The Detroit News, 12 do not offer recycling. Property owners and management largely cite limited building space as recycling roadblocks.
Giovanni Lucia, assistant manager at Cityside apartments on Joseph Campau, says for every 10 interested renters who view units, about two get upset that recycling is not available. One woman was so appalled that she started a petition, he says. Princeton Management may offer the service next year, he adds, but the focus has been on renovating the 142 townhouses and apartments the company purchased over a year ago.
“(Recycling) is not one of our last concerns, I don’t want to say that, but we have to make sure the pipes aren’t bursting,” he says.
Sam Magar, president of Magar & Co., which took over management of the 117-unit Kales Building on West Adams a year and a half ago, says recycling is on the list of improvements. There’s just a delay from the vendor, which is figuring out where to place the dumpster.
“It’s difficult because there’s tight space in this building that’s 100 years old,” he says.
Matthew Naimi, director of operations at Recycle Here! — a community recycling drop-off center in Detroit — says many older apartment buildings downtown were built for one-way streaming, or just garbage. Adding a second stream for recyclables might be challenging because management would have to find space for a large recycling container.
While some property managers may be wary of hiking rental prices to add recycling, Naimi says it isn’t that expensive to contract with a recycling vendor. He estimates the service costs roughly $1,000 a month for 100 units. That comes to $10 a unit.
Chris Sefcheck, 25, who didn’t want to disclose his complex, says he’d readily pay the extra 10 bucks — but not everyone feels the same way. Residents recently held a community meeting where someone proposed to lobby for a recycling service.
“It was shot down pretty quickly,” Sefcheck says. “I’m sure people didn’t scoff at the idea of recycling, but that it would cost them more. If you’re not a regular recycler, you don’t see any value.”
To read the full story, visit http://zerowastedetroit.org/2016/09/01/detroit-renters-frustrated-by-lack-of-recycling-options.