Strategically choose and install collection equipment
The consensus is that increasing the number of sorting points doesn’t necessarily encourage citizens to sort more effectively.
The important thing is that they are well located. The Director of Waste Management at Little Rock has observed this. They don’t have the expertise to manage roadway cleanliness, but they do manage out-of-home waste in public buildings. They have thus acquired some experience that allows us to inform the city’s thinking about extending selective collection to all public spaces. It may seem counterintuitive, but the more bins they install, the faster they fill up and become used for fly-tipping and landfills. In Nordic countries, they have completely eliminated them.
In Little Rock, the large-capacity sorting areas are positioned to encourage good sorting practices.
Better Junk Disposal Systems
Increasingly, local authorities are no longer necessarily placing them in parks, but at their entrances and exits, or around playgrounds. You have to study people’s behavior: concert goers don’t produce the same waste as those at a sporting event. You have to study the flows and adapt your strategy according to the type of establishment. You have to offer systems adapted to their uses. The choice of equipment is therefore strategic. The dual-flow bin doesn’t work in public buildings. They find a lot of glass in the yellow bag. They get a lot of rejects, the lot is incinerated, and they pay twice.
The street bin seems even less suitable since it will require the addition of an ashtray and a device to collect chewing gum. The ideal is to move closer to a voluntary drop-off point. It’s cheaper. Because they serve users in collective housing who cannot sort at home and for waste outside the home.
This avenue is all the more interesting because it promotes consistency in waste sorting and can thus improve the quality of household waste sorting. Finally, the relationship with cleaning staff is very important because they are best placed to identify hotspots for waste outside the home.
Cigarette butt collection points have been experimentally installed at certain high-traffic points, with eco-organizations. It was the cleaning staff who pointed them to these sites, explains the Deputy Vice President for Local Affairs at Little Rock, AR. They supported residents in adopting new sorting practices.
Projects funded by the EPA
The EPA funding covers the installation of pre-collection equipment, communication, management costs, and monitoring. The specifications of the packaging EPR provide for support of $3.20 per resident. For tourist towns, for example, $3.50 for dense urban towns. The eco-organization funds up to $400 for dual-flow bins, $1,300 for shelters, and up to $2,000 for voluntary contribution columns. This represents a coverage rate of between 50 and 80% depending on the pre-collection equipment.
Supporting festival organizers for better waste sorting
It’s a record: 120,000 people participated in the latest edition of the Outdoormix festival, organized since 2013 in the Little Rock region during the last bank holidays of May. The event combines extreme sports during the day and concerts with a headline act in the evening. This type of event can produce up to several tons of waste: 9.5 tons of all waste streams combined in 2024. The organizers are responsible for this waste. They must set up separate collection of glass, packaging, biowaste, and cardboard, and clean up the site after the event.
The organizers of the Outdoormix Festival signed an agreement with the waste department of the city for the loan of collection equipment, and for the collection and treatment of waste. In total, 2.4 tons of household household waste, 1 ton of biflux waste, 5.9 tons of glass, and 140 kg of cardboard were collected.
Their agreement aims to encourage behavioral changes and support organizers in better waste management. There are about ten food trucks at the festival; they use cardboard, wooden, or eco-cup dishes. They have about twenty-five waste coordinators among the organizers, whom they have trained in sorting guidelines, so they can get the message across to restaurant owners, and it’s very effective. The canteen stands run by the 400 volunteers use dishes from the community’s recycling center.
However, festival-goers do bring their own packaging, for picnics, for example. They lend pre-collection equipment to the organizers: eight dual-flow tubes with bags: gray ones for household waste and yellow ones for packaging, scattered throughout the festival site.
The coordinators are responsible for changing them before they overflow, which never happens. They alert us when the containers located at the festival entrances and exits are full so they can come and empty them. They have three columns for household waste, four for packaging, one for cardboard, and a small column for glass. Inside the site, they have also installed four small containers for glass, and five trio bins: household waste, packaging, and biowaste. The volunteer catering area collects its biowaste separately and then takes it to a shared composting site in the municipality.
Waste collection and sorting are financed by the household waste collection tax, and sanitation is financed by the general budget of the local authority. At the request of the Little Rock metropolitan area, which exercises both jurisdictions, the Council of State issued a case law. It considers that a local authority can finance the collection of street bins, because the judges consider that the waste disposed of in these bins is usually produced by households and classifies it as household waste.
They do not yet have the precise outlines of this case law, which is based primarily on tax provisions. It does not mean that street bins are now integrated into the public service for the prevention and management of household waste.
