"Innovations" Case Studies: Serving Diverse Populations with Recycling

Case Study: City of Monterey Park

Overview

The recycling coordinator of Monterey Park describes language as the main recycling challenge relating to population diversity issues. The citizens of Monterey Park speak a variety of languages other than English (such as Spanish and Chinese). A majority of Monterey Park’s population (81 percent) is either of Asian, Pacific Islander, or Hispanic origin.

Program Description

Monterey Park has developed several trilingual brochures and public displays to promote recycling. The city first produced a trilingual brochure on bulky item recycling to address the issue of tenant turnover in multifamily units. The brochure was printed on one 8˝-inch piece of paper and tri-folded. The main element of the brochure was a table listing the name of area thrift stores and the materials they accept. The creators of the brochure included text in three languages (English, Spanish, and Chinese).

Through grant funding, Monterey Park has also targeted outreach of materials such as PET and used motor oil. It has produced a trilingual brochure and public display on PET recycling, and a trilingual display, magnets, and brochures on recycling used motor oil.

The picture below shows Monterey Park's recycling display for community events using English, Spanish, and Chinese in the text.

The city reached out to elementary students with a storm pollution prevention and used oil recycling program and produced a trilingual brochure on used cooking oil (distributed to area restaurants).

As part of a regional effort, Monterey Park contributed funds towards public service announcements and radio advertisements in English and Spanish (produced by Los Angeles County).

Community officials are also considering simplifying Monterey Park’s recycling program. A recycling task force, comprised of community members and established by the city, reviewed the city’s program and found its complexity to be an issue in reaching the community’s diverse populations.

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Costs, Economics, and Benefits

Monterey Park translates its outreach material in-house. Based on the staff member’s salary and the amount of time spent translating materials, Monterey Park pays less than $150 a year for translation services. This equals about $75 for a trilingual, 3-panel, 8˝ by 11-inch brochure. Professional translators charge approximately $300 per 8˝-inch page.

Table: 1990 Demographics of Monterey Park, California (Source: 1990 U.S. Census)

To translate English into Chinese, an in-house staff member translates materials and then uses a specialized “off-the-shelf” program to typeset Chinese characters. The city manually translates English to Spanish and uses a standard word processing program to typeset the letters. Most word processing programs can produce the additional letters and symbols needed for word processing in Spanish.

Informal agreements between departments allow the use of bilingual staff to translate and typeset bilingual outreach material. Although the city pays bilingual staff more, it limits its need to hire a specialized multilingual staff member to translate recycling outreach materials.

Funding Mechanisms

Monterey Park pays for its recycling outreach from its portion of money received from the sale of curbside recyclables, which is approximately $20,000 per year. With such a low budget, the city cannot afford to hire outreach staff to focus on diverse neighborhoods. Nor can the community always afford to have multilingual outreach materials professionally produced. Instead, the community uses alternative methods to fund production of its diversity outreach materials.

For instance, it requires its exclusive residential waste hauler to pay the costs of multilingual literature produced at the startup of new programs (curbside recycling and yard waste recycling). Monterey Park uses in-house staff to translate outreach materials into different languages. The city has also received grants from various organizations to supplement the costs of multilingual outreach. The city has received grants from the League of California Cities, NAPCOR, and the CIWMB.

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Last updated: October 26, 2007