City Announces Matching Funds from Recycling Partnership for Blue Recycling Bins

PITTSBURGH, PA (November 18, 2019) Based on the City of Pittsburgh’s zero-waste goals and the City’s commitment to help residents transition to a containerized recycling system, The Recycling Partnership is offering Pittsburgh a grant of $500,000 for Pittsburgh’s curbside residential recycling program.

Earlier this year, Mayor William Peduto announced a Capital Budget proposal to fund blue bins city-wide for residents who receive service from the Bureau of Environmental Services.

Today, the Mayor announced an agreement with the national nonprofit the Recycling Partnership to match the city’s 2020 Capital Budget proposal to begin the three year program to purchase and deploy recycling containers city-wide. The Recycling Partnership invests in community recycling programs nationwide and will be providing in-kind technical assistance for Pittsburgh as well as helping with education and outreach.

“The Partnership is excited to respond to Mayor Peduto’s plan to help Pittsburgh transition away from a bag-based recycling program into a containerized one by offering to match the Mayor’s proposed investment dollar for dollar. By putting this grant funding on the table, The Recycling Partnership will boost the city’s ability to transition away from bags and move towards a more efficient and effective recycling program,” said Rob Taylor, Director of Grants and Community Development at The Recycling Partnership. “A move away from blue bags is a perfect complement to the city’s ‘Better Recycling, Better Burgh’ effort to encourage citizens to adopt bins and recycle properly.”

Distribution details, vendor selection, and a tracking system have not been finalized, but interested residents can sign up for updates as the city determines the program at the following link: https://pittsburghpa.gov/blue-bin-info/ or contact 311 by phone at 412-255-2621.

This initiative will expand on Pennsylvania Resources Council’s initiative that has provided Pittsburgh residents with over 10,000 blue bins and recycling education since 2015.

Recyclables placed loosely in blue containers are ideal for Environmental Services workers to collect. Using blue bags tends to clog machinery when processed at the Material Recovery Facility (MRF) run by Recycle Source in the Hazelwood neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Environmental Services collects waste and recycling from 115,630 residences inside Pittsburgh’s city limits. As a reminder the following recyclables are accepted for single-stream curbside collection by the city:

Cardboard, flattened and bundled

Glass bottles jugs and jars, caps and lids removed

Aluminum and steel cans

Mixed paper

Empty plastic bottles, jugs and jars, caps and lids removed

Pittsburgh’s Better Recycling Information Card

Limited on space and have additional recyclables in between recycling weeks? Consider using one of our six recycling drop-off centers. For location and hours visit: https://pittsburghpa.gov/dpw/drop-off

About The Recycling Partnership

The Recycling Partnership (recyclingpartnership.org) is a national nonprofit organization that leverages corporate partner funding to transform recycling for good in states, cities and communities all across America. As the only organization in the country that engages the full recycling supply chain from the corporations that manufacture products and packaging to local governments charged with recycling to industry end markets, haulers, material recovery facilities, and converters; The Recycling Partnership positively impacts recycling at every step in the process. The Recycling Partnership has served more than 1,300 communities and counting with best-in-class tools, data, resources and technical support, helped place 600,000 recycling carts, reached 60 million American households, and helped companies and communities invest more than $43 million in recycling infrastructure. In doing so, The Recycling Partnership has created meaningful social, environmental, and economic change. By the end of 2019, the nonprofit change agent estimates it will have diverted 230 million pounds of new recyclables, saved 465 million gallons of water, avoided 250,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases, and driven significant reductions in targeted contamination rates.