New Recycling Campaign Will Raise Awareness

How can you take a community with good recycling and make it great? The latest partnership between the Curbside Value Partnership (CVP) and the Solid Waste Agency of Lake County (SWALCO) aims to find out. Beginning this fall, residents in Lake County — who already recycle in impressive numbers — will be urged to kick up their efforts even more.

CVP is a national, invitation-only program designed to help communities grow their curbside programs through education. Since 2005, CVP has partnered with 29 communities and four states to develop, execute and measure highly effective education campaigns. SWALCO is a municipal joint-action agency that serves 41 municipalities including the County of Lake and Naval Station Great Lakes, which includes approximately 230,000 households.

“CVP and SWALCO are looking forward to helping consumers get more material into their recycling containers,” said Craig Cookson, CVP board member and director, sustainability and recycling, plastics division, for the American Chemistry Council. “Many Lake County residents are already doing a great job, and we want to help them understand how they can do even better. The good news is that it’s never been easier to recycle more of the plastics and other materials we use every day.”

As part of the partnership with CVP, SWALCO and it members will implement and measure a grassroots education campaign that is designed to increase awareness for curbside recycling, grow participation and ultimately boost volume. The campaign is expected to launch this fall with planning already under way. Education tactics for the campaign are expected to include marketing, an enhanced web and social media presence, advertising, public relations, and grassroots, community-level outreach. SWALCO will measure the impact of the campaign via the Emerge Knowledge Re-TRAC Connect data management tool.

“SWALCO is proud to partner with CVP for this important education campaign,” said Walter Willis, executive director of SWALCO. “We look forward to accessing and benefiting from the depth of CVP’s resources and expertise. We’re particularly interested in collaborating on an effective education campaign that will help us hit the 60 percent diversion goal we set for ourselves in our strategic plan. CVP will help us do this by encouraging our residents to really rethink the way they dispose of waste in their home and, by doing so, motivate them to recycle more.”

“We know that recycling is important in Lake County and that it is a community with a history of support for conservation and sustainability, at all levels, including the County Board and local elected officials, some of whom are even involved in developing our campaign,” said Steve Thompson, CVP executive director. “Despite this supportive environment there is still tremendous headroom for recycling. We want to help SWALCO’s members capture that headroom and educate their residents about all of the things they can recycle so they can do better.”

Officials plan to launch the campaign this fall, and CVP will promote best practices gleaned from the effort to communities across the country via its website (www.RecycleCurbside.org) and its new online training tool, CVP Connect (www.CVPConnect.org).