The City of Hartford will be moving to single-stream recycling beginning the week of October 26th. After a successful 4,500 resident pilot program, the City has decided to expand the program to everyone living in a 6-family building or smaller.
We were not part of the pilot program, and just received the formal notice of the change in the mail this weekend. In addition to making our recycling lives easier, the change also allows us to participate in a recycling rewards program run through RecycleBank. Apparently, they are going to be weighing the amount of material we recycle and awarding us points that can be used for shopping at partner stores. It will be interesting to see how this all works – even after reading the website it is still a bit of a mystery.
In any event, we are looking forward to receiving the free 64 gallon blue recycling carton in the coming weeks. The program materials say that we can dump just about anything recyclable into the new bin, and makes no mention of bundling or sorting. They still won’t take my styrofoam, but that wouldn’t have scored me many points in the weight-based tracking system anyway.
I’ll be sure to save up the magazines and newspapers so that we can launch our RecycleBank account with a strong showing at the first pickup.