Good news from the City of Spokane: This fall, they will make recycling much easier with the addition of single stream recycling at the curb. The City is working to get citizens information they need now, in advance of the changes. This will allow City of Spokane Solid Waste Management customers to put all of their recyclables into a single large cart without sorting.

The new service also will allow for more products to be recycled, including office paper, junk mail, grocery bags, cereal boxes, aluminum foil, and plastics numbered 1 through 7. Batteries can be recycled if they are put inside a plastic bag and placed on top of the cart.

Within the City of Spokane, customers will start receiving new blue carts as part of the new service near the end of September. They can begin using those carts on October 1. Customers should use their smaller blue bins for recycling until they receive their carts. After the blue cart is delivered, the blue bin can be kept for use at home or it can be picked it up by the City.

The recyclables will be taken to a new facility called the Spokane Material and Recycling Technology (SMART) Center that will be owned and operated by Waste Management, a private company that serves 20 million customers in North America. That facility is being built on land adjacent to the City’s Waste-to-Energy facility.

The City expects that the change to single-stream recycling will increase participation in recycling and reduce both collection and disposal costs. They estimate participation in curbside recycling will increase by about 50 percent with the introduction of single-stream recycling and that the amount of recyclables collected will grow by 75 percent. For each ton of material that the City recycles, they save $104 on disposal costs and earn about $22 selling the items. With this change, the City expects to save about $936,000 a year on disposal costs and earn about $400,000 in revenue.

The new 64-gallon blue single-stream recycling carts can be filled with:

Glass: bottles and jars (no lids).

Paper: newspaper, corrugated cardboard, magazines and catalogs, telephone books, printer paper, junk mail, cereal and pop boxes, shoe boxes, and non-coated paper products.

Metal: aluminum cans and foil, tin, steel and metal cans, aerosol cans (empty, no lids or tips), and small pieces of scrap metal.

Plastic: bottles, jars and tubs (no lids), and plastics numbered 1-7.

Customers can find more information in their August utility bill. For a complete list of acceptable materials or call the Recycling Hotline at 625-6800.

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