Washington city to expand multifamily recycling program

The Recycling Partnership, Falls Church, Virginia, has awarded a $200,000 grant to the Tacoma Solid Waste Management department in Tacoma, Washington, to help the city expand its multifamily recycling program. The grant will be used to provide improved recycling education, language access and outreach services to multifamily properties.

According to a news release from Tacoma’s Solid Waste Management department, Tacoma was one of 11 cities awarded one of its Leadership Grants following its Leadership Summit: 50 Cities Driving the Circular Economy. The Recycling Partnership says the summit brought together solid waste leaders and decision-makers from 50 of the largest cities geographically dispersed throughout the continental U.S. for the two-day summit. The event focused on ways to change recycling systems across the country.

“We are incredibly grateful to collaborate with The Recycling Partnership. With these grant dollars, we can fund focus groups that will help us adapt and grow our current program to be accountable to the needs of our diverse community,” says Tacoma Waste Reduction Project Specialist Sam Lake.

Tacoma’s project will use focus groups to determine opportunities for improved engagement with property managers, residents and operations teams to increase communication across all aspects of the program. Staff will also conduct five focus groups in Spanish, Korean, Khmer, Russian and Vietnamese to determine opportunities for improved multilingual outreach and to help develop materials in multiple languages. With the information provided by focus groups, the city will adapt and expand a multifamily recycling toolkit for a multilingual audience.

According to The Recycling Partnership, other cities to receive Leadership Grants were Baltimore; Detroit; Houston; Omaha, Nebraska; Philadelphia; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Tucson, Arizona; and Washington.