Tori Emerson, Waste Reduction Supervisor for the City of Greensboro, NC, shares how years of consistent resident engagement have made GSO Collects — the city's branded waste app — so deeply embedded in the community that residents treat it as their own.
Greensboro, NC is home to over 300,000 residents, and for the better part of a decade, Tori Emerson has been working to make sure everyone of them knows exactly what to do with their waste. As Waste Reduction Supervisor for the city, she oversees resident education, enforces recycling rules, and champions waste reduction as a self-described "recycling evangelist."
Ask any solid waste team what success looks like, and Greensboro has the answer: residents who don't just use their waste app — GSOCollects — they love it.
As an early adopter of a digital education platform, Greensboro has built a community where residents are just as invested in waste education as the team delivering it, a dynamic that goes a long way toward the city's goal of becoming one of the most sustainable communities in the Southeastern United States. “It’s become engrained into residents’ ethos around trash and recycling,” Tori explains.
How Greensboro Drives App Adoption Citywide
Since implementing a resident-facing education platform, Greensboro has worked to build the use of technology into the fabric of how the entire department communicates. Whether a resident receives a collection schedule, a recycling guide, or sees a social media post, it comes with a reminder to download the app.
With every interview, report, education program, and community event, the team works endlessly to drive awareness and downloads. As Tori puts it: "We've solved for so many points of friction for the residents to forget trash day with one tool. It's ubiquitous, it's everywhere."
The result is a level of unwavering resident ownership. When Greensboro made the switch to the Recycle Coach platform in 2024, residents made their wishes known about what they’d like to see in the new version of the app. And because of the platform’s versatility, GSO Collects is now exactly what residents want and need.
What Switching Waste Education Tools Actually Looks Like
When GSO Collects first launched in 2018, database setup took the better part of a week, working through spreadsheets line by line, reconciling local terminology, and manually entering and verifying information for depot and drop-off locations. When they made the switch to Recycle Coach, it was an entirely different experience.
"I didn't fully appreciate the ease of the onboarding process until I had completely finished it," Tori recalls. "It was really just an hour."
What made the transition stick wasn't speed alone. While the app is built on Recycle Coach technology, the branding is all Greensboro, a fully branded experience that carries the city’s identity into every resident interaction. "It's grounded into part of our city services' identity," Tori explains. "We've made this app a part of our DNA as a solid waste and recycling service."
How Greensboro Ensures Waste Education Reaches Every Resident
Not long after the re-launch, an accessibility issue was discovered: an updated layout change was incompatible with screen readers. Inline with ongoing regulation changes, the calendar was rebuilt with clearer labels, explicit text for each collection type, and design elements that worked for a broader user base.
"I'm really glad to know that that resident, and any other residents who use a screen reader, are able to use the app to its full functionality," Tori says.
For residents without smartphones, contact center reps can enroll them directly in automated voice reminders, a call the night before collection day that works just as well for octogenarians of the community as it does for a younger resident who needs a nudge to take out the bins.
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For communities considering integrating a tool into their outreach and education strategy, Tori's advice is simple: embed the app into everything. Every mailer, social post, news interview, and community event is an opportunity to drive awareness, and bringing contact center representatives along as advocates is one of the most effective moves a municipality can make.
GSO Collects has grown to over 70,000 users and more than half a million app interactions each month: a reflection of what's possible when a community is given the right tool and a team that consistently shows up to support it.
I think of the Recycle Coach tools like a cupcake… The schedules and reminders are the cake, and the education is the icing. When managing curbside recycling programs, you should never have your cupcake without icing, or you’ll get a lot of trash in your recycling! I’ve been educating residents about recycling for more than 10 years and I can honestly say residents care most that their stuff is picked up. We provide them critical information (schedules and service day reminders) and sneakily educate them about waste reduction and recycling with all the information available in the GSO Collects app. The unsolicited heartfelt appreciation residents express for GSO Collects “in the wild” always brings me so much joy because if they already have it, residents ALWAYS say how much they love it and if they don’t have the app they immediately say “I need that!”
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