Orange County, Florida, launches recycling education campaign

To reduce the amount of garbage in the recycling stream, the Florida’s Orange County Utilities Solid Waste Division has launched the “Think 5” recycling education initiative.

By focusing on the top five recyclables—plastic, metal and glass containers as well as cardboard and paper—the overall goal is to help raise awareness about good recycling habits, the county’s waste division says.

“Recycling has been a staple in our community for more than 25 years, and we’ve always had a great deal of support,” says Jim Becker, manager of Orange County Utilities Solid Waste Division. “To make recycling more efficient, we’re asking residents to only think about five items and to place those in the blue lid roll cart.”

As part of the new automated curbside collection program that started Jan. 1, 2016, residents of unincorporated Orange County were issued 95-gallon roll carts with blue lids for single-stream recycling that are collected weekly. The roll carts replaced much smaller 18-gallon bins that previously required materials to be sorted. While these new carts have the potential to boost recycling to higher levels, the success of the program hinges on the new education effort so customers can learn how to maximize the potential and minimize the amount of wrong materials that might go in the roll cart, Orange County Utilities Solid Waste Division says.

Like many Florida counties, Orange County, which ranked in the Top 20 last year with a 52 percent recycling rate, is working toward the state target of 75 percent by 2020.

Asking more than 200,000 households in Orange County to concentrate on five items increases the likelihood that more of the right materials get recycled, county officials say.

Elements of the Think 5 campaign can be seen at http://ocfl.net/recycles and on Facebook and Twitter.

The community can learn more about the campaign at Orange County Recycles Day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Nov. 12, at the Orange County Landfill at 12100 Young Pine Rd. in east Orange County.

Inquiries about recycling can be sent via email to Solid.Waste@ocfl.net or called in to the Orange County Utilities Solid Waste Hotline at 407-836-6601.