Recycling is now more accessible for residents of Siloam Springs apartments and other multifamily housing, thanks to a new partnership between the city and The Recycling Partnership.

The city’s sanitation department has started a multifamily recycling program that will provide on-site recycling service at four participating apartment properties. A grant from The Recycling Partnership that’s part of the nonprofit organization’s work on a broader Northwest Arkansas Recycling Roadmap helped fund the new program in Siloam Springs.

The Northwest Arkansas Recycling Roadmap is a five-year strategy developed by The Recycling Partnership in collaboration with local governments, solid waste districts and other organizations. The plan calls for increasing household recycling participation and the amount of material collected for recycling by 25% by 2030. It also calls for improvements to recycling infrastructure, processing capacity, more education and cooperation among communities. The Partnership estimates that about 117,000 tons of recyclable material currently end up in Northwest Arkansas landfills each year.

Participating apartment complexes in Siloam Springs will receive convenient on-site recycling service, along with recycling totes and information to help residents understand what materials can be recycled.

The program addresses a significant gap in Northwest Arkansas, where residents of apartments have fewer opportunities to recycle than people living in single-family homes. That makes the Siloam Springs effort notable.

Other communities around the country have taken similar approaches to amp up apartment recycling. In Cincinnati, for example, the city partnered with The Recycling Partnership on a multifamily recycling program that places recycling dumpsters or carts at apartment properties and provides residents with recycling bins and educational materials. In Portland, Oregon, the city requires larger multifamily properties to provide recycling service, while Seattle provides recycling containers at apartment properties and offers guidance and educational materials to property managers and residents.

For Siloam Springs, the new program offers a chance to bring some of those good practices to Northwest Arkansas. Rather than asking apartment residents to drive somewhere else to dispose of recyclables, the program puts collection infrastructure where people live.

The project is also one example of the regional roadmap moving from planning to actual projects. Other efforts already underway include recycling education campaigns in Springdale and Fayetteville’s transition to a larger, cart-based recycling system.

The larger goal is to make recycling easier, more consistent and more widely available across Northwest Arkansas as the region’s population continues to grow.