R³ Recycling: Project Background, Definition, and Scope

Recycling has become a near-universal option across the United States, but the specifics of recycling programs vary significantly between states, counties and municipalities. Although there are some apps and web-based guides that provide information about how and where items can be recycled in particular locations, the comprehensiveness, accuracy and currency of the information used in these tools is often unclear, and they do not provide easy access to the underlying data. There do not appear to be any resources that consolidate recycling-related data across jurisdictions, and recycling data is often spread across multiple government agencies, units and vendors even within individual jurisdictions. Consequently, comparative assessments of recycling programs are often burdensome and time-consuming but fail to yield useful results (E.B., 2015; Salkin, 2016).

Developed in response to these issues, the R³ Recycling Repository aims to:

• Provide centralized access to Washington recycling-related data originating at municipal, county and state levels
• Facilitate research and comparison of recycling programs and policies through curation that improves the machine-readability and interoperability of recycling-related datasets
• Pilot a state-level recycling repository in order to assess challenges likely to confront recycling repositories launched on regional or national scales.