Moving from residential waste education to commercial and business waste education

Hi Jennifer,

These are great questions. It's so good to hear that you now have a clear idea of who your target audience is. I've reached out to a colleague to get a response to your questions and will let you know when I hear back. 

Kind regards,
Julie

(Thanks Julie for reaching out) 

Hi Jennifer, 

That can be quite the shift in outreach.  I'd suggest exploring what is going on here in California. A few years back, our state agency CalRecycle mandated food scraps recycling (i.e., food waste can no longer be in the landfill bin).  This has necessitated entirely new food scraps programs for both residential and commercial customers. For commercial customers, infrastructure barriers (bins, pickup frequency, etc.) have been highly influential.  As you mentioned, a good next step will be to determine the types of waste causing the issues, along with the audience responsible for creating them.   At least with the new food waste focus, one-on-one consultations with commercial businesses have been very helpful.  At those meetings, a waste representative walks managers through their waste streams and pickup options in detail. Every jurisdiction in CA must comply with this law, so you could contact some of them to see how they approached the rollout and what issues they encountered.  
More information: https://calrecycle.ca.gov/organics/slcp/ 

For an employee-focused example, at Action Research, we conducted a workplace recycling project with Keep America Beautiful and PepsiCo to increase the recovery of recyclables from desk-side trash bins.  We varied the bin setups to test ideal options.  
Here is a write-up of the program:  https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/keep-america-beautiful-announces-results-of-recycling-at-work-research-study-300073351.html 
And here is a fact sheet: https://keeplouisianabeautiful.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/[email protected]

Hopefully, those examples point you in a good direction to get started. 

Joey 

THANKYOU Joey and Julie!
As we have seen in our residential waste strategy, infrastructure is important, as well as drilling down to identify particular materials and their source. 

You're welcome, Jennifer, best wishes with your important work!