Apartment Recycling Program: How to Create One in 4 Easy Steps

There are many reasons to consider starting a multi-family community recycling program for your properties. It lowers trash pickup fees, it's great for the environment, and it can help attract (and retain) eco-conscious tenants. One of the biggest advantages of starting an apartment recycling program, however, is what it can do for your ESG scores. The more you recycle, the better your ESG score — and portfolios with strong ESG scores attract investors.

So, how do you start a successful multi-family community recycling program? Here are the steps to making it happen!

The Fundamentals of a Successful Multi-Family Community Recycling Program

To succeed, an apartment recycling program requires a few things, namely:

Planning

Logistics

Education

Often, these sorts of programs require working with local municipalities and within local laws to establish a plan and coordinate logistics.

This might be manageable if you only have one or two properties, but it can be harder to stay on top of if you have complexes all over the country. That's where working with a partner can come in handy (more on that in a minute).

4 Steps to Establish an Apartment Recycling Program

How can you ensure your program has these fundamentals? Here's a step-by-step overview of how CheckSammy helps to create and establish an apartment recycling program.

Conduct a Waste Audit

We always start with a comprehensive waste audit. This helps give you a good idea of your properties' current waste and recycling potential and understand what types of recyclables your properties produce. Our team leverages innovative technology to analyze your waste streams. We provide tailored reports that detail your waste generation, recycling and diversion rates, and recommendations for optimizing your waste management.

Create a Customized Program

Based on your waste assessment, we create a solution to divert as much of your waste away from landfills as possible. For example, controlling textile waste may be an important factor when creating your recycling program. Then, we develop a solution that works best for you and your tenants. This could be setting up our SmartBINS on your properties, planning junk pick-up days, coordinating a trash valet service, and more. Ultimately, we work to create a program that helps reduce waste, increase recycling, and boost ESG scores for your properties.

Implement Tenant Education

Education is critical. Many of our multi-family clients will place detailed information into the move-in packages so that the information is immediately available for new tenants. Then, we provide easy-to-use and adopt solutions and help coordinate education using signage and other tools. When your tenants have the right information and easy access to recycling solutions, they'll be encouraged and empowered to participate in your recycling program.

Host Regular Events

We also support and encourage holding events. For example, CheckSammy works together with our clients to create a textile recycling event, which is a day when your tenants can unload unwanted clothes, bedding, towels, or other textiles. These events can count towards your ESG score, and they're an easy way to educate your tenants and accomplish a lot of recycling in one fell swoop. (If the event is successful, we can create a more long-term, regular event schedule for your properties).

Getting Started on Your Multi-Family Community Recycling Program

When you partner with CheckSammy for your apartment recycling program, you're working with a partner who eliminates the hassle of recycling. We customize a program that fits your properties and ESG goals. Even if you already have a recycling program, we can help fill in the gaps.

As the world;s largest bulk waste and sustainability operator, our nationwide coverage allows us to implement your plan on a national level, too. Our Sustainability Hubs make it possible to provide you with same-day service across every city in North America. You don't have to worry about devising different plans for different complexes. Instead, we can handle the logistics for all your properties.

Additionally, everything we do is backed by data. Our industry-leading sustainability platform, Veridiant, makes it easy for you to boost and verify your ESG metrics. After all, it's all about the data. Whether you're looking to consolidate job tracking, access analytics and data visualization, or find certificates of diversion, our user-friendly software solution has got you covered. When you choose us as your multi-family community recycling program partner, you get a complete chain of custody breakdown of what we did with every item.

Contact us today, and let us help you boost your ESG scores with a customized apartment recycling program!