Hi there,
I'm searching for best practices in regards to Multi Family Recycling/Composting education outreach. I'm specifically looking for challenges, success stories, and techniques used.
I can be contacted at [email protected] or through the forum.
Thanks for your help!
Kayley
Kayley Fesko
Public Program Coordinator
City of Calgary
Canada
MF Recycling Best Practices (Education)
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Metro Vancouver have been very generous with their knowledge and materials and I would highly recommend following up on Ruben's advice. I'm sure you've also been in touch with the City of Edmonton, but in case you haven't, they are a leader in waste diversion and education. You can try contacting Garry Spotowski, [email protected], who has done amazing work educating Edmontonians on waste diversion.
Bill MacKinnon
Project Technologist, Smart Buildings and Energy Management
BC Housing
Canada
www.bchousing.org
...
Hi Kayley,
Metro Vancouver developed an enormous amount of material for multifamily. We developed an entire icon set, a set of photographs, signage that uses the above, and a how-to booklet called the Blue Book.
Most of that is available free to download from the resources page of metrovancouver.org. For the Blue Book--which is dozens of professionally designed pages you can mix and match to suit your needs--you should contact [email protected]
The Blue Book is deigned to be graphic-heavy and text-light, so it keeps messages simple and easy to consume, and also works for populations that do not have English as a first language. Again, this is all free, and hundreds of hours of work have been put into it.
All that being said, I think everyone should get a Blue Book, but I don't know that it really matters. When you look at garbage composition, the biggest stream is food scraps, and the second biggest is newspaper.
So, if you aren't collecting food scraps, no education is needed. If you are--well Metro has full and free resources for food scraps recycling as well.
And I challenge anybody to find me someone who doesn't know that you should recycle newspaper.
Education is not the problem. The barriers are elsewhere.
I looked at dozens of multifamily sites. Even though Metro's target is 70% diversion from landfill, 90% of the volume was devoted to garbage. Well, you can't fit 70% of the material into 10% of the space. That is just impossible.
So, at one of my test sites we took 200 townhouses from 8% diversion to 35% diversion, and we did it primarily by increasing their access--we gave them many more blue totes, green bins and cardboard dumpsters. Education was very minor, and I believe, mostly a token act.
I would be happy to talk further with you about this, but please do check out all of the resources Metro is sharing.
Cheers,
Ruben.
Ruben Anderson
smallanddeliciouslife.com