Portland Apartment Residents Guaranteed Recycling Opportunity 

Oregon state law allows cities to require apartment community owners to provide recycling for residents, and most cities do. Portland goes even further, requiring apartment community owners to make recycling as easy as throwing out the trash . . . or else be hit with fines. Conventional wisdom suggests that apartment residents would be ideal candidates for recycling, as they tend to move around a lot. Many are transplants from cities without a recycling program, and they often move again before establishing recycling as a habit. In addition, apartment residents often have less space than many homeowners to store newspapers and plastic bottles until recycling day. Such obstacles persist even when apartment community owners play by the rules. A recent Environmental Protection Agency study of recycling in multifamily housing estimated that residents recycled 14.6 percent of their waste versus homeowners' 16 percent. Two years ago, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality compared trash from a sample of Portland-area apartment communities to garbage picked up from single-family residents. Items that apartment residents could have recycled--glass, paper, metal, plastic bottles--made up roughly 25 percent of their trash. For homeowners, the percentage was 23.6 percent.