Schenectady gets hip with recycling promotion

The city is turning to hip hop in an attempt to get residents to recycle.

As rap music blared in the City Hall rotunda, city officials kicked off their new “recyclution” effort, passing out recycling pamphlets and setting up displays of paper and container recycling that they hoped would visually answer many of the common questions.

No, you don’t have to take off labels on bottles. Yes, you can mix cardboard, newspaper and office paper. But whatever you do, your containers must be clearly marked: yellow stickers for bottles and cans, blue stickers for paper.

The city’s recycling rate currently hovers between 7 and 8 percent, Commissioner of General Services Carl Olsen said.

When the city started its recycling program in 1992, residents set aside 25 percent of their waste for recycling.

“Shame on us,” he said, taking responsibility for the decrease. “We didn’t reinforce the educational information regularly. This is a transient population. A lot of people never got their hands on the information.”

Now the city is passing it out online, on Twitter, through the schools and on television, in an public access channel infomercial paid for by the city AFSCME union. AFSCME members pick up recycling and trash, among other duties.

They’re also wearing new uniforms: shirts with recycling logos. Their trucks are getting a public-information upgrade too — the recycling trucks have been painted white and green.

“It’s pretty difficult to miss that that is a recycling truck,” Olsen said of the first truck to be painted. “We’re going to reinforce this any way we can.”

He’s even found a hip hop song that urges listeners to recycle.

“We’re going to make an effort to reach out to the youth of the city,” Olsen explained.

Acting Mayor Gary McCarthy emphasized the financial value of recycling. If the city returns to its 1992 recycling rate, Schenectady will save $400,000 a year in landfill tipping costs and other expenses.

“So there’s a significant savings to the taxpayers,” McCarthy said. “And it’s just the right thing to do.”