City of Greensboro, NC’s Solid Waste and Recycling Department: #Recycleright Champions

Looking ahead, it is Emerson’s goal to get the AI cameras on all their recycling trucks as she thinks that it will allow them to reach 100 percent of the residents that are participating in the recycling program.

SEATTLE (Waste Advantage): Developing the first single-stream program on the East Coast, the city of Greensboro, NC’s Solid Waste and Recycling has had a recycling program in place since 1991. Serving a population of about 300,000 residents, approximately 29,000 tons of recycling are handled per year with trash and yard waste collected weekly, and recycling and bulk waste collected biweekly. City staff collect from households in the City limits to take the material to their MRF. Recycling carts are a unique color—brown. “In 1991, blue was not considered a recycling color, so they went with something that was an earth tone because they thought it would be good message that recycling is good for the earth,” explains Waste Reduction Supervisor, Tori Carle Emerson. “We have green trash cans, brown recycling cans, and just implemented gray yard waste cans.” With a staff of 170, the Solid Waste and Recycling Department has a sizable fleet of trucks, and three were just outfitted with Prairie Robotics’ AI-enabled cameras, which will identify contamination at the source and educate residents based on what they are putting in the carts.

Contamination Tracking
Since 2018, the department has had a manual contamination tracking program where staff lift the lids, inspect the contents, and stickers are left behind on the cart if any contaminants were found. A “clean” sticker is an FYI for residents that their cart was inspected and no or minor contamination was noted; an Oops! Sticker is left on the cart with a follow up postcard sent to residents if more than one or two items are contaminated. If severe contamination is noted, a pink skipped cart sticker is attached that says, “Your recycling is not being collected because of the following issues …” Then, that is followed up with a postcard. Going through many different iterations from 2018 to today, it “began as a shot in the dark as to who was getting inspected and who was not because we didn’t really have any data to go off of,” says Emerson. “However, we started using a tracking method where we recorded the addresses of who was getting tagged and who was getting tagged repeatedly, so this involved a lot of Excel sheets.”

In 2021, the department performed its first recycling composition study with a third-party consultant that involved taking a representative sample of different routes so they could see their level of contamination. “We are trying to focus our outreach efforts on the places that need more education, so the first year that we got these audit results, we had the ambitious goal of doing pre-collection inspection on every single cart on 12 routes twice since there are 12 months in a year. We thought we could get out to one route per month on to two of their collection days, and we picked the 12 most contaminated routes to be our routes for the year. However, reality check, we only got to five,” says Emerson.

The first year of the audit, the department found that residents had an average of 36 percent garbage in the recycling bins. “I thought there would have been less than 20 percent, but it was a hard-core reality check that people don’t know what they’re doing,” comments Emerson. After making a plan and working off the information they had, they did a second city-wide audit. Only two routes were inspected in both 2021 and 2022, one route had 54 percent garbage in their recycling. Emerson says they went out to inspect every cart twice, tagged the contaminated carts, and mailed follow-up postcards. As a result, in 2022, that route had 31 percent garbage in the recycling. She explains that it happened on a second route that had 55 percent garbage in the recycling. They went out and did the pre-collection inspections and in 2022, they had 41 percent garbage in the recycling. She also says they had an overall drop in contamination from 36.2 percent to 30 percent. “It was very exciting because we knew that something we were doing was working, but we had to remember that two data points do not make a trend. We had to keep at it. So, we picked the 12 most contaminated routes and did an inspection on them and saw the same thing happened again.”

By the third audit in 2023, some of the dirtiest routes from 2021 and 2022 did not receive pre-collection inspections because they were no longer one of the dirtiest routes. Despite not getting additional education, the numbers were trending in the same positive direction—from 54 to 31 to 28 percent contamination, so that showed that there was some durability of the program’s impact and doing the audits was a great way to reach residents. On one particular route, when they went out a second time for a pre-collection inspection, contamination had dropped down to 16 percent. “An audit of your materials and knowing which routes are heavily contaminated is the best thing you can do,” says Emerson. “The information is literally worth its weight in gold as far as data goes because it tells you who needs more education and who is doing it right. From 2021 on, the mysteries of what residents were really recycling was illuminated and felt empowered to make a difference.”

Moving to an Automated Process
A big believer in not wasting time, last year Emerson says the department moved from working with Excel sheets to the Prairie Robotics feet-on-the-street app. “We log into the app, and the first thing that it pulls up is a map that shows us the closest addresses; we can click on the addresses we want to audit based on our location. The Prairie Robotics system gives us the added ability to take a picture with our phone, which then populates onto a postcard with the date and the contamination issue. It also automatically tracks whether it was the first, second or third contamination notice. We have a third strike letter that shows the three different pictures of the cart contents. Postcards and letters are generated from the Prairie Robotics dashboard, sent to our in-house print shop, and mailed out once or twice a week depending on volume. It is great because before this, we manually created postcards with date stamp, stickers, and handwritten contaminants. The postcards inform residents that if the cart continues to be contaminated, it will be removed.”

If residents contaminate the recycling carts four times within a six-month period, their recycling cart is removed. “We came up with that because we felt like four times within six months is a third of your collections and if residents are doing it wrong that often, then they are probably doing it wrong more often than we are seeing it. We have been doing this since 2018 and we haven’t removed very many carts—100 or less per year. We also have had about 10 or 12 residents come in every year and get their carts back after they’ve gotten it removed. They must come to our office and sign a pledge that says, ‘I understand why my cart was taken away. I understand what’s recyclable, and I understand if I continue to contaminate my cart, that it will be removed permanently.’ However, we do make concessions for tenants who have just moved in, and the previous renter or homeowner had their cart taken away. We explain why they don’t have a recycling cart and send them home with a recycling guide. We know it wasn’t their fault and try to make that personal contact with residents.”

Emerson points out that the auditing program has improved the contamination percentage from 36 to 25 percent overall within four years. Although the program is labor-intensive, it is worth it. “If I had inspectors on every truck, I would know which areas to focus on the most. So, these AI-powered cameras are like having my staff and I riding around on the truck all day long. Another thing I really like about the Prairie Robotics system is that they use a very high-powered GPS system that knows exactly where the truck is, and there is a camera looking in the hopper and identifying the contamination.”

At the point that Emerson took over as Waste Reduction Supervisor in 2017, the department did not really have a way of tracking contamination. “My predecessor had a list of handwritten places that he knew had heavy contamination from his years of working with the city, but I didn’t have a way of tracking any of it. At the time, the drivers all had a tablet in their truck, and they would use this old system to tag an address as a skip or contamination, and that was okay, but the drivers didn’t like it. They didn’t take any pictures. It was just based off what they would see as the contents of the cart fell in the truck. Ten drivers might tag 10 or 20 houses and our one recycling inspector would tag 100 or more, so it was very spotty reception as far as who would use the tablets and who would not for a long time, but it did the job. Even though now the drivers don’t have to do anything with the Prairie Robotics system, they have been asking when they are going to get the tablets back,” laughs Emerson. “Currently, we’re exploring operators tagging only carts they intentionally leave behind because they can see contamination sticking out of the cart or the lid is open. I think that is going to be a better partnership between us rather than trying to look in the hopper camera and tag contamination. We have come back to this intersection of the drivers wanting to have some input because they know that we are going to remove the carts if people are repeat contaminators.”

Tagging Process
Starting with “the dirty dozen” routes in 2021, the department takes the audit data and sorts it every year by most contaminated and least contaminated and whoever is in those top 12 are put on the focused route list. Although the initial routes have changed from 2021 to 2023, they already have a focused route list for the rest of 2024 and the beginning of 2025. This strategy is going to continue even with cameras on the trucks. “I am anticipating that the process will become a little bit easier and more focused because when we went out and did inspections manually, we could only see the top quarter of the cart. We don’t do a lot of digging because of safety issues. We are trying to look at 900 to 1,200 carts per month and there are only two or three vehicles tagging before the recycling truck gets there. Two of us will ride together because we can tag out of the passenger side window,” says Emerson. The routine is started at 6:00AM, before the trucks are scheduled to roll out at 7:00AM. “Usually, the driver and supervisor know that when we go out, we are going to tag some carts so they may have a bit lighter of a load that day, so they may wait for about 15 or 30 minutes before leaving and it gives us enough lead time to do what we need to do. We have a route subdivided into five sections; we will let the drivers know what sections we are in, after we have finished, and where we are headed next.”

The department has had volunteers in the past who helped with tagging, but it is a skill that is acquired over time and takes practice. Carle says that while volunteers are great, they cannot operate a city vehicle, so department staff must drive, which means that they are not able to effectively look at the cart. What has worked really well is borrowing staff that are on light duty. “Sometimes, if they have an injury that has prevented them from doing their regular job and they need another task, I can have them drive while I tag with the app, and I’ll just ask them to help me write out the stickers. It gives them the opportunity to not burn their sick or vacation time and it gives me the opportunity to turn them into recycling experts before the end of the day. That has been a lot more beneficial than anything else that we have tried to do to increase staffing.”

A Personal Touch
Emerson likes to hear the feedback from residents because it gives her a chance to educate them on contamination items and that is a step towards behavior change. “I have gotten questions like ‘Why are you digging through my trash can?’ I get calls from people complaining that we are wasting tax dollars by tagging and printing out a colored photo of their trash and sending it to them. I have heard it all—it wasn’t me, it was someone walking down the street, it was my kids, it was my husband, I’ve been recycling since 1970 and I’ve always put my plastic bags in my recycling bin. With any complaint, I explain why we are doing this—that we are trying to educate you. If you call me and complain, I am grateful because I have a chance to talk to you and answer your questions. I am going to explain that this is an education program and there are no penalties associated with it other than removing the cart if you continue to contaminate it. Our goal is to get people to recycle correctly and put things in the right place.” Carle stresses that she always tries to bring a human element into it because there are people touching the items that are put in the bin. If you put an old bookshelf or a bag of garbage in your recycling cart, there is potential that someone is going to get hurt or that is it going to break the machinery at the recycling center, and then Greensboro might not be able to recycle anymore. “I am trying to educate residents, so we can keep recycling and ensure that the people who work at the recycling center are safe. When I have a chance to talk to people, even the one who is most upset appreciates me taking the time to explain it to them, and I will offer to send them a paper recycling guide in the mail and send out a personal note of thanks. People like that personal touch.”

Emerson has a full-time and a part-time educator that fills in and helps with events. Taking what they can from the data, it is used to focus on outreach and education programs with community groups, schools, festivals, and their social media page, called GSO Goes Green. “We put information out based on the contamination that we see. We also put all the routes on a map and ask our GIS person to pull out points of interest for us, such as rec centers, libraries, schools, or other groups of people that we can reach out to and ask if they would like to partner in a recycling education and outreach program,” explains Emerson. “We have gotten to know a couple of schools and their teachers within our heavily contaminated route areas. Some may have more Spanish speaking residents in the area, so when we go to those routes, we take extra Spanish materials with us in case we talk to anybody on the route. We also have a table at a couple of curbside farmers markets, so that we can reach more people in the areas where they work, play, pray, shop, etc. We will tailor different kinds of education programs to not only the contents of the cart, but also its location.”

Looking to the Future
Looking ahead, it is Emerson’s goal to get the AI cameras on all their recycling trucks as she thinks that it will allow them to reach 100 percent of the residents that are participating in the recycling program. “The ultimate goal is behavior change, and I’ve proven that, when you poke the bear and show people the picture of the problem, they will either change their behavior or they get rid of their recycling cart because they do not want to participate. My philosophy is that it is better for the recycling to be in the garbage, then for the garbage to be in the recycling because it creates more problems. We cannot force people to participate, and you have got to come to terms to that when you are in a position like mine.”

For Emerson, this is only the beginning. She points out that a 37 percent reduction in contamination is huge, as it is a way to revolutionize the way they do education and outreach. She also has plans to expand their commercial recycling division. “We do collect from businesses, so I’m eager to expand education and enforcement to that division. Finally, we want to try and flip the script with these recycling trucks as they are going to be collecting data from every house whether or not there is contamination. We are going to be able to see who participates in recycling. So why not focus on all those houses that are not participating and send them an encouraging message to recycle. We are going to try to increase our participation and, in turn, our tonnage. There are a lot of ambitious goals out there for waste reduction and getting more recyclables from households, and if Greensboro can be a part of that, it will be more fuel for the future of recycling.” 

Courtesy: www.wasteadvantage.com

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