How Much Plastic an Apartment Building Wastes Every Year (And How to Reduce It)

Most people don’t realize how much plastic waste a single apartment building produces. When you think about hundreds of residents buying laundry detergent, dish soap, hand soap, and all the other household cleaners we go through each month, the numbers add up fast. It’s not just a few bags of recycling; it’s thousands of plastic bottles every year, coming from just one property.

And here’s the surprising part: most of those bottles don’t get recycled. Even when residents put them in the right bin, a large portion still ends up in landfills because cleaning product containers are difficult to process due to residue, dyes, and mixed materials. The result is a constant stream of unnecessary plastic waste that could easily be avoided.

To put things into perspective, the average household goes through around 10–15 cleaning product bottles per month when you combine detergent, softener, dish soap, surface cleaners, hand soaps, and similar items. Multiply that by the number of units in a building, and it gets big quickly. A 200-unit property can easily throw away more than 20,000 plastic bottles each year (just from basic cleaning supplies.)

That number is even higher in buildings with families, busy laundry rooms, or residents who clean frequently. And again, most of these bottles are single-use and non-recyclable. Once you see the scale of the problem, it becomes clear why sustainability efforts in multifamily buildings matter so much.

Fortunately, reducing this waste doesn’t require changing how people clean or asking them to adopt complicated habits. The easiest approach is simply offering an alternative to single-use plastic. When residents can refill the products they already use, they naturally cut out a huge portion of their waste without even thinking about it.

That’s why on-site refill stations are becoming so popular, they make sustainability effortless. Residents bring whatever container they already own, refill only what they need, and avoid buying a brand-new plastic bottle every time they run out. It’s a small change for the resident, but on a building level, it can eliminate thousands of bottles within the first year.

For property managers, this kind of initiative is especially meaningful. It shows residents that the building is paying attention to environmental impact in a practical way, not just through marketing language. It also aligns with the growing expectations of renters who want their homes to support eco-friendly choices without making their daily routines harder.

Every building has limited control over what residents buy or how they live, but offering a refill option is one of the rare solutions that genuinely works. It reduces waste, encourages healthier habits, and gives the property a real sustainability story backed by measurable numbers.

If you’re curious about how much waste your specific building could eliminate—or how a refill station fits into your common areas—our team can walk you through examples and projections based on your unit count. You might be surprised how big the impact can be.

Small changes add up quickly, and in a multifamily building, they add up even faster. Reducing thousands of plastic bottles a year is absolutely possible, and it starts with giving residents a smarter way to refill what they already use every day.