City considering mandate for apartment recycling

Iowa City's landlords could be required to provide recycling pickup to their tenants for the first time under a new ordinance being drawn up by city staff.

Jen Jordan, Iowa City's recycling coordinator, said an ordinance mandating that apartment and condominium owners offer recycling services — an issue students and other residents have for years asked the city to address — could go before the City Council in early 2016.

While Iowa City landlords have been required to provide trash services since the late 1970s, the city has not updated its code to include recycling, Jordan said.

Currently, the city offers recycling pickup to single-family homes and buildings up to four units, but an estimated 45 percent of Iowa City's households — or 12,000 of the city's 27,000 residences — are in buildings larger than fourplexes.

"This has been an issue bubbling up to the surface for decades, and I think there's enough desire not only in the student population but also increasingly in the population of tenants who are older and are living in apartments, in condos," Jordan said. "So I think there's enough community support to make this happen."

The change would affect the more than 1,000 apartment and condominium buildings in this university town, where the majority of students live in off-campus housing.

"We're looking at doing it the exact same way trash is serviced, in that apartment owners and managers would have to hire private services," Jordan said, noting that most of the professional solid waste hauling companies locally also offer recycling services.

The city conducted a six-month recycling pilot program in 2012 with five apartment complexes and condominium associations to examine the feasibility of landlords using private services. The city and the landlords each paid for a third of the cost of the project, and a grant covered the final third.

Jordan said the study found the average cost to landlords was an additional $2.57 a unit per month to add recycling. In one case, Jordan said, a landlord was able to reduce its trash service from twice a week to once a week, thus offsetting the cost of the recycling.

Chris Villhauer, president of the Greater Iowa City Apartment Association, said while he is personally a proponent of recycling, an ordinance requiring landlords to provide the service would raise a number of issues, including finding space for containers and ensuring materials are sufficiently separated when deposited by residents.

Villhauer, a property manager for Southgate Property Management, said the added expense to landlords could also affect rent costs.

"I think people are for it in general; it's matter of not making it cost prohibitive," Villhauer said. "Because if it is cost prohibitive for landlords, it would make rent costs go up."

Jordan, however, said for a lot of properties, the addition of recycling would be a "relatively minimal" cost increase.

"Cost is always one thing that's come up as a barrier, and the other thing is space and logistics," Jordan said. "And we know there are going to be properties with space issues, which is why we're taking our time to figure out if there needs to be exceptions built in or how we can make sure everyone is doing the best they can and getting recycling to as many people as possible in the community."

In 2013, University of Iowa Student Government conducted a campaign to encourage property owners to provide recycling services for apartments, including an online petition that collected more than 1,700 names. UISG also conducted a survey that found 83 percent of students would be willing to pay a monthly $2.50 fee for recycling.

Iowa City Council member Jim Throgmorton said he was pleased to hear an ordinance could soon be coming before the council. Throgmorton said he'll wait to see the specific language of the ordinance before casting his support behind it, but he said the desire for recycling in apartments buildings has been expressed to the council repeatedly over the years.

"We have consistently heard about this from the student liaisons to the council and representatives from other student groups," Throgmorton said.

Reach Josh O'Leary at joleary@press-citizen.com or 887-5415, and follow him on Twitter at @JD_OLeary.