Recycling in apartment buildings

Recycling in apartment buildings can be tricky. There are a number of factors that may contribute to problems with recycling in apartment buildings:

• Limited space for bins in apartments
• High rental tenants turnover
• Education and language barriers
• Less ownership and responsibility over shared bins
• Carrying recycling from apartments to bin rooms

To address this challenge, Council offers a proactive, evidence-based contamination management program for apartment buildings. This project consists of four different intervention strategies. Each education strategy is formulated based on separate evidence-based behaviour change tools:

• Prompts – displaying educational bin stickers and bin bay signage
• Convenience – providing bags for storing and transporting recycling
• Feedback – weekly posters providing feedback on recycling bin contents
• Commitment – asking residents to make a public pledge to unbag recycling

The Apartment Recycling Program is based on trial program which ran in 2020 and 2021 and operated across 18 apartment buildings, covering 1,500 apartment premises. Over 6,000 bin inspections were undertaken to assess intervention impacts. Findings demonstrated that all strategies led to improvements in recycling contamination and behaviour. The Commitment and Convenience strategies were the most successful with over 50 per cent reduction of incorrect items found in the recycling bins.