Louisville, KY faced a challenge familiar to many North American cities: high contamination rates and a need for local waste and recycling education at scale, leading them to improve their communication with residents and embrace an education-first approach to boosting recycling.

Even in cities with the most robust outreach and engagement teams, resident participation can be inconsistent, and contamination issues—fueled by wish-cycling and a lack of accessible information—can pose a serious challenge. This confusion often drives residents to search for answers on Google, where they might find incorrect or non-local guidance, or they may give up on better recycling and waste disposal habits altogether.

While AI-powered tools may offer an innovative solution to this long-standing problem, they often come with hefty price tags that are prohibitive for many mid-sized or smaller municipalities.

For local governments, the result is costly: materials that could have been diverted end up in the landfill, while staff are flooded with 311 calls and frustrated residents.

The team at Louisville sought to decrease contamination by focusing on smarter, more targeted communication and saw a significant increase in the volume of recyclable materials collected.

Louisville’s Education-First Approach to Boosting Recycling

In 2019, Louisville’s Solid Waste education team, kNOw Waste, launched a partnership with Recycle Coach to modernize its resident education strategy. Alongside traditional outreach methods, the city empowered its residents by providing:

  • Access to the ‘What Goes Where’ material search tool
  • Collection pick-up reminders and alerts for service changes
  • Interactive, locally compliant education on waste and recycling

In 2023, the Waste Management District kicked off its Recycle Right bilingual tagging program to help residents understand what they got wrong or right in their bins, directly at the curb: green tags for no visible contaminants, yellow for bins with smaller amounts or less serious contaminants, and red for unacceptable materials.

Combining this tactic with Recycle Coach, the city reinforced those lessons digitally. On each bin tag, a QR code was included. This prompted residents to download the free app and learn how to properly dispose of contaminants via the search tool, turning a single warning tag into lasting behavior change.

Read the full article about boosting recycling through education at Smart Cities Dive.