News
Minneapolis requires businesses to offer recycling
A new ordinance now requires all businesses in Minneapolis to offer recycling. The law, which took effect on Sept. 1, expands the recycling requirement already in place for all residential property, and aims to make recycling a regular option throughout the city.
Under the new ordinance, businesses are required to provide regular recycling collection (at least twice a month) for all materials generated onsite deemed recyclable in Minneapolis, including paper, cardboard, metal cans, plastic bottles, and glass bottles and jars. They also are required to provide written recycling information and instructions to tenants and/or employees annually, and to create and maintain a written recycling plan. “‘Throwing away’ trash is expensive,” says a statement on the city’s website. “Recycling takes two expensive problems – managing garbage and generating new material – and turns them into each other’s solutions.”
The ordinance applies to all commercial and business properties. Apartment buildings in the city already participate separately under residential laws. Property owners can go online to find a step-by-step guide to setting up a new recycling system, and Hennepin County’s website also provides technical assistance and education resources.
“Soon, wherever you live, work, learn, worship, play or do business in Minneapolis, you will be able to recycle,” Mayor R.T. Rybak told the Twin Cities Daily Planet newspaper. “This ordinance gives recycling the normal, routine status it deserves. Now it’s up to all of us to do our part to recycle.” The new ordinance also moves the city toward its target to increase recycling and composting of discarded waste to 50 percent by 2013, Council Member Elizabeth Glidden, who chairs the city’s Regulatory, Energy and Environment Committee, told the Daily Planet.
Read the city’s press release or the Daily Planet report.
