The Holiday Waste season is over, but its effects remain. Not only is waste a year-round issue, but the 25% increase of household waste between Thanksgiving Day (USA) and New Year’s Day isn’t gone – it’s just coming back again next year.
The extra 2.9 BILLION tons of waste – per week – that piled up in landfills during this season isn’t disappearing overnight. There’s many ways to reduce this waste once it winds up in the landfill, but the best way just might be preventing it from arriving in the landfill in the first place.
The Holiday Waste Wrap-Up
80% of holiday waste can be reused, re-purposed, or recycled, and in our experience, people want to do the right thing – they want to recycle properly.
However, when they don’t know where to place items, and they can’t easily find the information, they often end up ‘wishcycling’ – which can be dangerous.
We like to preach the three C’s: to reduce Contamination, make sure you Communicate before you Collect.
This applies not only to items such as lights, tinsel, and other holiday ‘tanglers’ that will wrap around the machinery at the recycling center, creating work stoppages, equipment failure, and potential harm to employees.
It also applies to schedule confusion and changes. Weather delays due to snow, ice or wind; seasonal Interruptions due to public holidays; and special collections for things not usually collected year round all contribute to missed collections, complaints, and illegal dumping.
How Do We Move Forwards?
To make your community better recyclers, you need to make recycling simple for them. Make communication, information access, and pick-up requests easy with Routeware.
Our suite of education, calendar, and service requests (for bulky and special pickups, like Christmas Trees) tools are here to help you combat holiday waste. Reduce contamination, reduce illegal dumping, reduce phone calls, and simplify recycling & waste disposal for everyone – with the click of a button.
In the spirit of education, we put together a 12 Days of Trash landing page that lays out why Holiday Waste is such a problem, as well as how we solve it together.
We know some of your citizens recycled, re-used, and reduced fantastically this holiday season. We also know others did not – and not necessarily through fault of their own, but due to the lack of easily accessible information needed to make the proper choices.
Our goal is to reduce waste not just during the pesky holiday season, but year round. Join us in our efforts to simplify waste management.
ICYMI, here’s our previous Holiday Waste related blogs from the past two months: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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12 Days Of Trash – The First 4 Days | 12 Days Of Trash – The Next 4 Days
| 12 Days of Trash – The Last 4 Days
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Top 7 Tips To Tap Into Digital Tools And Tackle Your Holiday Waste Messaging
| Putting A Bow On 2023
| 5 Key Topics To Look Forward To In 2024 In The Waste & Recycling Industry
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P.S. Check out the Routeware Report for a highlight of all our customers accomplished in the past year.
