Current collection schedules incentivize the disposal of waste as trash. As a result, a building that does a good job recycling, needs much more storage space than one that doesn’t. Increasing recycling and organics collections,, with a commensurate decrease in trash collections, would encourage recycling and lead to cleaner trash set-out overall.

In high density neighborhoods, sidewalk space is impacted by trash bags on collection days, particularly when trash and recycling are collected on the same day. This creates issues of accessibility and is visually unappealing. Staggering of the collections of trash and recycling would allow far less space to be taken up on any one day.

More broadly, collection schedules and associated resources should be aligned with the density of each neighborhood. Densely populated areas with little storage space within buildings and a limited amount of sidewalk space should be provided with more frequent collections of both trash and recycling than less dense neighborhoods where the option exists to store larger amounts of trash.

Left: an example of waste set out from an apartment building of 200 units (450 residents) with an average recycling diversion rate, showing how balancing recycling collections would provide a clear path on the sidewalk on all days of the week. In this example there is approximately 50 feet of sidewalk set-out space. Right: the same apartment building with a hypothetical 90% diversion rate for recycling; in this case the need for balanced collections is even greater due to spatial inefficiencies, with the sidewalk entirely blocked on Mondays.