This is an optional service, and only a fraction of community members will sign up. The base monthly fee covers the ongoing time and cost associated with the program regardless of pickups. This includes things like customer communication, managing the sign-up process, the cost of the bins, etc.

The separate pick-up charge covers costs associated with collecting your materials each time: the labor, fuel, processing fees, etc.

It's an 18-gallon bin. It comes with a domed lid that adds another 2 gallons to the capacity. The dimensions are 18.3"D x 27.75"W x 13.5" H (17.5"H with the lid on).

Existing lifecycle analysis (LCA) research for grocery bags shows that when choosing between plastic and cotton to manufacture bags, the environmental impact of cotton appears to be higher than that for a variety of plastics for several indicators including climate change and resource depletion.

The production of fabric bags comes with its own environmental footprint that starts with the impacts of agriculture. Depending on the environmental indicator in question, the LCAs estimate cotton bags may need to be reused hundreds or thousands of times to equal that of single use plastic bags.

While grocery bag LCA results are not directly applicable to the bags used in this new collection service, the research shows that choosing cotton over plastic is not automatically an environmental win in all situations.

Reuse of bags in the Recycle+ program, regardless of material type, has not been determined to be feasible at this time. The plastic bags must be 30% post-consumer recycled content, unless unavailable in the marketplace. Bags will be recycled once emptied. Staff will keep an eye out for updated research and continue to look for ways to increase the value of this collection service for customers and for the planet.

It's crucial to the success of the program that materials be free of contamination when they're sent to their end markets. The bags need to be transparent so that your driver can quickly see if there's any contamination in the materials they're collecting. Common household bags reused by customers are opaque. They're also often smaller in size, which may prevent items from being fully contained and protected from the elements once collected.

It's important for the items accepted in your standard recycling cart to stay consistent. The sorting equipment that separates everything is finely tuned for these items alone so that they don't end up in the wrong place as contamination. Also, these items have many stable end markets. This means we can be confident they'll be recycled. (In Oregon, it's actually illegal for items collected as recycling to be thrown away.)