TERRACE GARDENS

As a native Californian, Scott Miller says recycling is in his blood. So, it made his blood boil whenever he would see plastic laundry detergent jugs tossed into the trash bins in the laundry room at his Lower East Side co-op.

"The recycling area was just around the corner, but without signage and without an opportunity to make it easy to recycle in that area, it was all just going into a landfill," says Miller, who lives at the 1,728-unit Seward Park Cooperative.

It was one of the things that led him to volunteer last summer to take part in the Apartment Building Recycling Initiative, a two-hour program offered monthly by the city's Department of Sanitation (DSNY). There he learned about quick and often free fixes that can increase the amount of recycling and ensure that the proper things are going into recycling bins.