Rollcarts with updated decals | Rollcarts with updated decals | Photo courtesy of Community Environmental Services
Sometimes the simplest solution is the best solution. At least that’s the case for an Oregon Metro-Portland State partnership addressing equity in garbage and recycling for multifamily residences.
“When you think of putting stickers on trash cans, it does not sound like meaningful work,” said Christa McDermott, director of Community Environmental Services, a research and service unit based in the Center for Public Service and provides students with opportunities to get real world experience in waste management. “But it's a really key part of some of the equity practices that Metro is trying to implement.”
Recent updates to Metro’s regional service standard code for garbage and recycling services placed a renewed emphasis on multifamily residences and reducing barriers to accessing garbage and recycling. To improve access and wayfinding, Portland State students worked with Oregon Metro to update waste and recycling bins with new informational stickers identifying where items belong.
Photo courtesy of Community Environmental Services“This project was really to help provide wayfinding signage to help residents reduce contamination, understand what is recyclable and what's not, as well as help Metro identify where we have gaps in services, such as missing waste streams,” said Lisa Clark, a project manager with Oregon Metro. “For example, the requirements for multifamily communities include recycling, garbage and glass available on site for residents. We've discovered that most of our communities don't have glass bins as required.”
Hannah Carleson, MPA ‘23, started working on the project with Community Environmental Services as a student, and now works as Program Administrator for CES. Carleson said more than 20 students worked on the Metro project during the 2-year period that updated more than 2,000 multifamily complexes and quality-checked more than 300 sites across the region.
“We would encounter things like overflowing containers or stuff stuck outside of the enclosure or even bulky waste like mattresses or furniture left there because there's not good access to getting rid of bulky items,” she said. “It got to a point where we as the workers trying to place new signage couldn't access the containers, so how could the residents even hope to access the containers to use them?”
While documenting access issues and updating signage, students developed a set of best practices for maintaining the wayfinding system, which came with its own set of challenges, Carleson said.
“The hardest part was empowering staff to make those judgments of where items should go, or what should be replaced,” she said. “It felt like an exercise in helping the students understand how to go through a protocol while making judgment calls and reporting their observations and how to address an unexpected situation.”
Clark said students were also instrumental in collecting data that will help Metro inform future policy work — like documenting enclosures that aren’t meeting the needs of the community, for example.
Although this project has concluded, McDermott added that CES is always looking for students to gain (paid) experience improving waste streams and waste management.