Orange County, FL

Orange County, Florida, famous as the home to theme parks and attractions, is also home to more than 1.5 million full time residents. Orange County is responsible for providing curbside waste and recycling service to more than 230,000 households. The County implemented a comprehensive Recycling Quality Improvement Program (RQIP) to address the issue of recycling contamination. Since 2019, this program has educated over 190,000 households based on the best practices of The Recycling Partnership. The County’s recycling collection program has a high participation rate of 87 percent and a setout rate of around 60 percent. RQIP encourages residents to change their recycling behavior by using four-week periods of tagging. Orange County uses various tools to help residents, such as sending informational mailers, providing personalized feedback on each cart via tags, not collecting contaminated carts after one warning, and gathering data with a smartphone app. The county also analyzes this data to increase the effectiveness of the program and tailors messages based on the most common contaminants. Typically on each route, prior to the outreach campaign, only four out of 10 carts are observed to be clean. However, since once RQIP is applied to a route, the number typically increases to 7 clean carts out of 10. The program has reduced the number of carts with plastic bags, film, or wrap by 42 percent. It also resulted in a 13 percent reduction in contamination by weight and improved recycling behaviors in 47 percent of carts with contaminants in the targeted areas.