The Raven Recycling Society has found a way to reuse to help others recycle.

Earlier this week, the recycling centre delivered four bins to residences around town – two to the Yukon College residence and two to the Kontiki Apartments – ­to allow residents more options when it comes to recycling.

"It just all fell together,” Joy Snyder, Raven's executive director, said in an interview Tuesday.

For years, the same bins sat in front of Raven's facility on Galena Road, each bin serving as a depot for a specific recycling material – paper, cloudy plastic and so on.

Last year, extensive renovations to the entire facility were done. A new outdoor bunker drop-off was built, designed to make it easier for customers to drop off their recyclables.

Also in the past year, Raven received a new Small Materials Recovery Facility. Simply put, it's a conveyer belt machine that makes it easier and faster for Raven to sort out the recyclables.

That left Raven with bins that could have gone unused.

The city's goal is a 50 per cent diversion rate of waste from the landfill by 2015.

With that in mind, Raven officials came up with a plan that would make use of the bins, make it easier for those living in multi-residential buildings to recycle and, hopefully, move toward that 50 per cent diversion rate.

It cost Raven about $500 to cut the bins in half to bring them down to a more manageable size and building some steps for each of the bins and paint them to indicate one half is for paper and one half is for plastic.

"So this is our pilot,” Snyder said of making the first four available.

Raven officials want to "get the bugs worked out” with the initial four before making more available, she added.

At the same time that Raven was working on making the bins available, Kontiki Apartments manager Anne Pittens was wondering how to deal with the rising amount of items filling up the garbage bins.

Aware of the city's move to reduce the amount of waste coming into the landfill, Pittens called Raven to see if there were any options for the apartments.

As luck would have it, Raven was working on getting the pilot started and wondered if she was interested in taking part.

Last week, they were delivered to Kontiki's 17 Teslin Rd. and 3 Klondike Rd. locations and from day one, residents had them in full use.

Many residents, she noted, had either been throwing out their recyclables because they weren't able to drive to a recycling facility or they would save them up and have to take a large load down to the centres.

"It's been a really positive response,” Pittens said.

She had already heard from a number of residents in the approximately 22 units each building has, happy that there is an onsite location for recycling.

Many had already dropped plastics or paper or both off in the bin on their way out of the building in the morning.

Once each of the bins are full, Pittens will call Raven to have it picked up at a cost of $30 per pick-up.

Pittens believes that will work out to be less than what Kontiki pays for garbage pickup.

After a few pickups, Pittens will have a better sense of how often the recycling needs to be collected, and she and Raven will come up with a schedule.

Both Pittens and Snyder said there may be issues that come up over the first little while that will need to be worked out, which is why it's a pilot program at this point.

If all goes well though, Raven will make the remaining bins available to others and perhaps even have to find more bins elsewhere if it proves popular.

Already, Pittens is eyeing up another one for Kontiki's downtown apartments on Hoge Street.