"Innovations" Case Studies: Serving Diverse Populations with Recycling

Local Government Funding and Tips

The community may utilize contract language that requires haulers to track recycling participation rates for various neighborhoods. Cities with good relationships with their waste haulers can focus the haulers’ outreach on diverse populations without adding new language to their contracts.

Informal Agreements

GreenTeam, one of San Jose’s waste haulers, is required by contract to perform five outreach campaigns per year. Although the contract language does specify that the contractor must reach diverse populations, the contract does not specify the cost or size of these campaigns. The city meets with the waste hauler to help develop the campaigns and help select target audiences. Because GreenTeam wants to continue its contract with the city, it typically goes above and beyond the contract requirements by performing such things as door-to-door outreach in multiple languages (English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and other languages).

Funding Mechanisms

Generally, communities fold the cost of outreach to diverse populations within their overall budget for outreach or recycling programs in general. Many cities seek grants to offset their costs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), the California Integrated Waste Management Board (CIWMB), and the National Association of PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) have awarded grants to cities to use in implementing recycling outreach to diverse populations.

Tips for Replication

• Allocate staffing and budgets for outreach to address the unique situations among diverse populations.
• Encourage your city’s diverse citizens to participate in your recycling program by making them feel that they are a part of the city.
• Keep programs simple.
• Produce and distribute multilingual education and outreach materials. Generating one brochure with a recycling message in multiple languages can help keep printing costs to a minimum.
• Have multilingual staff members available to field phone calls.
• Use bilingual “foot power” to get the recycling message out.
• Visit people on-site and help them solve their recycling-related problems.
• Target specific cultural events within the community such as Cinco de Mayo and Chinese New Year festivals with multilingual outreach displays.
• Perform waste audits and create a database in order to track the characteristics and special needs of each type of waste generator in the city.
• Stress cost savings through recycling.

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Last updated: October 26, 2007