Philadelphia launches citywide single-stream recycling

July 8 -- Philadelphia is the largest East Coast city to move to a citywide single-stream recycling system.

Mayor Michael A. Nutter kicked off the city´s "All Together Now" recycling program and "BINdependence Day" celebration at City Hall, July 7. The city has phased in the one-bin system in several neighborhoods. All 540,000 households now can put aluminum and steel cans, glass jars and bottles, plastic bottles, paper, cardboard, cereal boxes, newspaper and magazines into their blue recycling bins. If one bin is not enough, they can use any container, marking it with "recycling."

Single-stream recycling has increased the city´s curbside recovery rate by 35 percent since 2006 in neighborhoods the city implemented the system. Philadelphia´s residential recycling rate was about 6 percent before the new program.

It is unclear how many households will be able to take advantage of RecycleBank LLC´s incentive-based recycling system, which uses radio-frequency identification tags to weigh recyclables at the curb and reward households based on the amount they recycle.

Contact Waste News reporter Joe Truini at (330) 865-6166 or jtruini@crain.com