City of Akron and Keep Akron Beautiful Announce the City’s Lowest Ever Recycling Contamination Rate

Akron, Ohio, Oct. 1, 2024 - At a press conference today, Akron Mayor Shammas Malik and non-profit partner Keep Akron Beautiful (KAB) announced the city's most recent recycling audit shows a contamination rate of only 12.5%. This rate brings the city's contamination costs down to $0 and in fact, starts to create revenue for the city's recycling program. The audit checks the level of contamination in Akron's collected recycling to determine how well residents are recycling items that can be recycled and not including items that can't be recycled. The lower the rate of contamination, the less expensive the recycling program becomes.

"Today's announcement of our lowest ever recycling contamination rate is a huge success for our city's recycling program and for all of our residents who care about recycling in Akron," said Mayor Malik. "Our partnership with Keep Akron Beautiful to conduct the Recycle Right campaign over the last 5 years, combined with our new glass drop off recycling program and the efforts of our drivers and team to educate our residents, has successfully caused a drop in our contamination rate of nearly 27%. These numbers not only improve the quality of our recycling stream, but also ensure that our program remains sustainable. I'm incredibly proud of this achievement for our city."

Before the city and KAB began the Recycle Right campaign in 2019, the contamination rate of Akron's recyclables was 39.3%, which is high. This rate cost the city $205,031 in contamination costs. The Recycle Right campaign is a communitywide initiative to improve the quality of recycling in curbside carts by providing residents personalized and real-time curbside recycling education and feedback.  The initiative mobilizes specially trained personnel from Keep Akron Beautiful to conduct curbside cart observations.  Residents who have contaminants (non-recyclables) in their recycling carts receive informational "Oops" tags on their carts with direct feedback designed to improve recycling cart contents (example available here).  Recycling carts found to contain contaminants such as trash and other non-recyclable items are not emptied.  Instead, residents are given the opportunity to correct the mistake and return the cart to the curb the following week. 

After the first two rounds of the Recycle Right campaign, the contamination rate dropped down to 26.3% which brought the contamination cost down to $38,038. Last year's audit confirmed the continuing success of this program showing that the city's contamination rate had further dropped to 22.3% meaning the city had nearly cut the contamination rate in half during the course of the campaign.

In 2023, the city implemented a glass drop off recycling program to allow residents to recycle glass in a way that wouldn't contaminate the recycling stream. The city recently announced in the first year of that program, at least 80 tons of glass have been collected. Additionally, the city and KAB again launched the Recycle Right campaign this year from Monday, June 10 through Friday, August 9. Before this year's campaign, the city and KAB set a goal of improving the contamination rate to less than 20%.

"Not only did we meet our goal of a less than 20% contamination rate; we blew that goal out of the water to only 12.5%," said CEO and Executive Director of Keep Akron Beautiful Jacqui Flaherty-Ricchiuti. "This is an outstanding accomplishment for the city and our organization, and we are so proud to see our efforts paying off in this way for Akron's recycling program."

Year-to-date the city has spent about $8,000 on recycling costs; however, clean recycling has generated a little over $21,000 in revenue in the same time period which puts approximately $13,000 back into the recycling program.

Clean recyclables are paper, cardboard, cartons, metal food, beverage cans, and plastic bottles and jugs. Containers should be empty and clean, and the recyclables should not be bagged.