Recycling Up Slightly In Cuyahoga County: 5 Things To Know

CLEVELAND, OH — The Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District recently released its annual recycling report, looking at recycling in each of the county's 59 communities. The numbers are encouraging, with the majority of cities and villages improving their recycling rates and hitting the county's 25 percent goal.

There were still stragglers however. A list of individual community reports is available below the five must-know facts.

1. Of Cuyahoga County's 59 communities, 46 beat the recycling rate goal of 25 percent. Of those, 15 had a recycling rate of more than 50 percent.
2. What's a recycling rate? The recycling rate is the percentage of residential waste diverted from landfills through community reuse, recycling and composting programs. The recycling rate is calculated by dividing the tons recycled by totals tons of waste generated.
3. Cleveland Heights led the county in recycling rate. In 2015, the city had a recycling rate of 70 percent. In 2016, that number jumped to 76.59 percent. The city generated 15,018.25 tons of landfill waste (aka waste that could not be recycled) in 2016. The city also had 3,013.86 tons of recycled waste (think cans, boxes, etc.) and 46,131.85 tons of recycled organics.
4. One of the communities that lagged way behind the 25 percent recycling rate goal was the seat of Cuyahoga County, Cleveland. The city had a paltry 13.63 percent recycling rate and only generated 366.12 tons of organic recycling waste in 2016. Cleveland's 2016 performance was actually worse than 2015, when it had a 15.6 percent recycling rate.
5. The lowest recycling rate in the county belongs to North Randall, which had a 0.15 percent recycling rate for 2016. That's actually down further from 2015, when the city had a 0.2 percent recycling rate. North Randall only generated .03 tons of recycled waste and .35 tons of recycled organic waste.

Find out how your community performed according to the report.

• Beachwood
• Cleveland Heights
• Lakewood
• Mayfield Heights
• Shaker Heights
• Solon
• Strongsville
• Westlake

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