Background
Background
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The contamination in recyclables from the RCC programs has grown in importance in recent years because of its costs and safety impacts on recyclables processing at material recovery facilities (MRFs) which are becoming more widely recognized and better understood. To address this issue, state and local governments have implemented programs that provide simpler educational instructions to residents on what products can be included in their curbside recyclable collection programs (Becker 2014). To assist the effort of battling the contamination of recyclables, national organizations, such as The Recycling Partnership, have developed recycling anti-contamination kits that are made available free of charge to recycling program managers. They have also provided grants to numerous communities to support cart implementation and inspection programs (Becker 2014).
In December 2019, Orange County Utility (OCU), FL, began an innovative initiative to provide personalized feedback to a significant fraction of unincorporated area residents on their curbside recycling behaviors and to quantitatively measure the extent to which this feedback reduced the amount of contamination in the County’s recycling program (OCU 2021). This initiative, termed the Recycling Quality Improvement Program (RQIP), was implemented on included nearly 74,000 households distributed around across the County, comprising approximately 32% of the entire County's unincorporated area. The neighborhoods served in the RQIP represented a geographically and demographically diverse mix. In the RQIP, Orange the County used the “Feet on the Street cart-tagging program” to successfully reduce the contamination rate of the curbside collection programs (OCU 2021). The cart-tagging program is an ongoing program, relying on teams of trained recycling monitors to traverse County neighborhoods on scheduled recycling collection days to inspect recycling setout carts visually. The inspections determine whether residents are properly using their recycling carts for targeted recyclables (i.e., recyclables accepted by the recycling programs), such as cardboard, bottles, and cans, or if residents are placing undesirable and unrecyclable items (i.e., contaminants) in their carts. After each inspection, recycling monitors place an informational tag (“Great Job” tag = clean cart, “Oops” tag = cart with non-recyclables) on each recycling cart to communicate directly to each resident
Information gathered during this study will be complimented with the proposed survey and the open-source socio-demographic variables in the US Census. The resulting database will allow for the prediction of the baseline recycling behavior of a community, as well as the projected changes after a similar tagging program, with the environmental and financial cost-benefit analysis of the proposed recycling outreach effort.
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