At the May Sustainability Committee meeting, the Committee discussed difficulty differentiating between the waste and recycling containers (Attachment A) provided by the city’s waste haulers for waste collection from residential and commercial properties. They agreed that effective messaging and identification on carts and dumpsters can be accomplished through unified coloring, multilingual phrasing, as well as detailed stickers that depict what can and cannot be recycled. The committee passed a motion requesting the city mandate the use of unified coloring and messaging on these containers, as follows:

·         The City of Miami Beach should work in partnership with the franchisee waste haulers to develop a solution that increases education, improves recycling rates and reduces contamination;

·         The City of Miami Beach should mandate unified color and messaging on all newly purchased bins (not retroactive);

·         The City of Miami Beach should design appropriate visual graphics / labels to be used city wide;

·         Either the City of Miami Beach or the franchisee waste haulers must print appropriate visual labels; and,

·         The City of Miami Beach or the franchisee waste haulers must install labels on all cans on all sides to achieve agreed upon consistency.

Since the conclusion of that meeting, Sanitation staff has been working diligently with the city’s approved waste haulers, Progressive Waste Services and Waste Management, on improving overall messaging efforts. Both companies have agreed to make improvements as outlined within the motion. However, they expressed concerns over having all the franchisees’ utilize a unified color scheme and graphics. Both companies stressed this was not feasible since each company has its own brand with specific colors and styles to represent their respective businesses. The Environment and Sustainability Department recommends that the city develop a “Miami Beach Recycles” sticker (Attachment B) that the haulers will be required to put on their dumpsters and cans for consistent messaging and make them each receptacle identifiable from a distance.

Aside from concerns regarding branding, Waste Management and Progressive Waste have made several changes to improve messaging on city waste and recycling containers, as follows:

Waste Management

Waste Management has standard single-stream recycling stickers (Attachment B) which are placed on both recycling carts and dumpsters. They have committed to inspecting their process and will carry out an audit of their routes and containers over the next 90 days to ensure that 100% of recycling containers have the appropriate messaging. Waste Management will also begin ordering yellow lids for their recycling containers and will begin phasing out the existing lids as their budget allows.

Progressive Waste Services

Progressive Waste has re-labeled a significant number of the containers that did not have the most recent multi-lingual single stream recycling messaging (Attachment C). They have committed to continue re-labeling any of the older containers as needed until 100% have the current visible decal. They anticipate having this completed on all accessible containers within the next 90 days. Similar to Waste Management, they will continue transitioning to yellow lids to further differentiate from garbage containers.

 
The Sanitation Division and Public Works Department will review and revise the anticipated request for proposals associated with the franchise waste haulers to incorporate messaging and container standardization in 2019 in conjunction with the Sustainability Committee motion.