Solving the plastic lid dilemma

When I heard that Agri-Plas, a company located in Brooks, Oregon, was going to start converting plastic lids to oil, I decided to find out if apartment residents would recycle plastic lids. I asked the manager of my apartment building if he would allow me to set up a system to recover the lids. I designed a poster to explain the process to the residents. I placed the poster along with plastic bins in the recycling rooms on all nine floors in my building. I also placed posters on the building’s bulletin boards, requesting help from the residents in collecting the lids. It didn’t take long to find out how they would respond.

Within a few days lids began appearing in all of the baskets. People told me they never understood why they were asked to remove the lids and throw them in the garbage. Since placing the bins in the recycling rooms, we have had a steady stream of lids being recycled. The system has drastically decreased the number of lids being left on the containers. This is a classic case of how micro-recycling can work. We have incorporated the collection system in other buildings, with great success in each building. (Bottom photo), Matthew Lane, Community Manager of the 1200 Building, checks out the lids collected in the first couple of weeks.