Bag bans, beautification programs, and outreach initiatives: Santa Fe, NM puts in the effort to keep their city clean.
Home to 87,500 residents, Santa Fe is relatively new to Recycle Coach. Peter Olson, Outreach Coordinator at the City of Santa Fe Environmental Services, works to get the word out about the app. Part of Keep Santa Fe Beautiful (a branch of Keep America Beautiful) and the city’s sustainability group, he has also been part of the implementation of a strict bag ban in the city. And on top of everything, he works with the city on residential and commercial waste collection.
Benefits of a Recycling Education Platform
For Peter, the most significant advantage of having Recycle Coach is the scheduling tool. It’s particularly useful when there are schedule disruptions, such as holidays, Peter explains. The “What Goes Where” search tool is another feature heavily used by the municipality’s residents. Peter shares the story of a resident who recently moved out of the city limits where Recycle Coach notifications were no longer relevant to her new schedule. But she didn’t want to delete the app—she wanted to keep it for the “What Goes Where” feature, which was still relevant to her while the schedule was not.
A Unique Approach to Outreach
In addition to promoting Recycle Coach over the radio, Santa Fe utilizes hundreds of screens around town in lobbies of hotels, restaurants, and malls to broadcast recycling shorts. Showcasing a family and their recycling antics, Peter and his team created a series of 15-second ads that reach audiences with pertinent recycling information while being entertaining, succinct, and informative at the same time.
Implementing Recycle Coach in Your Community
Peter says that “it’s always best—if you want to tell somebody not to do something—to give them an option on what to do.” He follows through on this by providing the Recycle Coach QR code in all his messaging. When residents aren’t sure how to recycle correctly, Peter and his team provide the solution.
Making a concentrated effort to increase Recycle Coach usership, Peter has noticed a decrease in contamination during his two years in the role. “Make it as easy as possible for people to get it, educate yourself on how to use it properly, and at every opportunity you can, [encourage people to use] Recycle Coach,” Peter suggests. “It’s super easy to put it on all your marketing messages.”
[I use] the Recycle Coach app and the QR code a lot in my marketing ads that say, “Don’t do this, but do do this: use Recycle Coach.” It’s very handy to be able to give somebody something to do.
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