The City of Knoxville Solid Waste Office is sponsoring a Curbside Recycling Signup Event on Saturday, July 23rd at the Regal Downtown West 8 Movie Theater. The event will allow City residents who currently receive weekly City trash pickup service to sign up for it's free curbside recycling program.

The one-day event is set for 12 p.m. until 5 p.m. This event is in conjunction with an Environmental Awareness Day at Regal Downtown West 8 Theater to celebrate the release of the movie "The Last Mountain."

"We are encouraging residents to come out and sign up for the Curbside Recycling Program on Saturday July 23rd at the Regal Downtown West 8 Movie Theater" said John Homa, the City of Knoxville's Solid Waste Project Manager. "We want to make the community aware that we have over 14, 000 households already in the program which will be offered to the first 20,000 that sign up.

"We have a mid August deadline for our initial group of participants to sign up. The first round of carts will be delivered based on these registrations," Homa added.

Residents that sign up at the event Saturday, July 23, will receive a free in home recycling bin from the Alcoa Foundation. The new Curbside Recycling program is at no charge to city residents who can sign up on the web at www.doyourpartwiththecart.com or by calling 311. The new service is scheduled to start in October of this year.

In addition to the City Solid Waste Office and Regal Downtown West 8 Movie Theater, other partners of the event include, the Alcoa Foundation, Keep Knoxville Beautiful, and Best Buy.

Other Curbside Recycling Information:

The single-stream, curbside model makes recycling as easy as throwing away trash since residents would no longer have to separate recyclable items. Instead they simply place the recyclable materials into a single container, supplied by the city, and it will be picked up every two weeks by the city's contractor.

As of Wednesday morning July 13, 10,915 households had signed up for the curbside recycling program. Another 3,409 Knoxville residents who are customers of the Waste Connections curbside recycling program are automatically included in the new free program. That raises the total number of households in the city that are signed up for the program to 14,324.

The city has been working for several years to develop a city-wide curbside recycling program in response to citizen requests for it and to reduce the amount of material going into the landfill.

Citizens can learn more about the program, or sign up for it, by visiting www.doyourpartwiththecart.com. They can also sign up by simply calling 311 or 215-4311.

Send Questions to [email protected].