Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the May 2025 print edition of Recycling Today under the headline “All about the execution.”

Cards Recycling CEO Dustin Reynolds doesn’t mince words when it comes to what it takes to successfully deliver on a municipal waste and recycling collection contract.
“You have to execute, and you have to execute flawlessly,” he says.
Throughout the past several years, Cards has built a strong track record of rolling out waste and recycling collection programs in new markets. Fueled by an aggressive acquisition strategy, the Fayetteville, Arkansas-based company now operates in five states—Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, serving both cities and counties. Cards manages 17 locations, including seven transfer stations and two material recovery facilities, and provides services to more than 200,000 customers per week.
No two programs are exactly alike, according to Reynolds. But when it comes to rolling out successful recycling plans and collection programs, whether through winning a bid in a municipality or inheriting a contract through an acquisition, he says a combination of due diligence on the front end, consistent communication with community leaders and residents and minding existing data are the most important factors.
Doing the homework
Before beginning waste and recycling collections in a new service area, Reynolds and his team at Cards gather as much data and research on the new market as they can.
“We need to understand what types of service are important to the residents and then what matters most to the [city] council, because sometimes those priorities don’t always align,” he says. “For residents, it could be the range or type of services offered. For the council, it could be billing, payment terms, software or communication. We always start with addressing those two things.”
Cards then analyzes specific data points, such as household counts and tonnage. This informs decisions on routing, service levels and potential needs for extra carts or specialized services based on the material stream in the community.
“Each municipality is different, and what’s important to one city versus another city could be adjacent to each other, or they could be completely different,” Reynolds says, adding that different locations could require back-door or drive-up service or extra pickup days, for example. “We want to know pricing, we want to know who the incumbent [hauler] is and we want to know the terms of the agreement and how many times that agreement has been renewed because you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with.”
Tim Bolduc, CEO of Milton, Florida-based Adams Sanitation, which provides residential and commercial waste management and recycling services throughout the Florida Panhandle, also says haulers must be put in advance work to make collection a seamless process.
Adams has rolled out municipal and countywide collection programs that can span hundreds of square miles, and Bolduc says the company will identify staging locations that are close to where it will have different levels of distribution.
“If it’s a county, you may have two or three staging locations in the north, some in the central portion and then some in the southern portion of it,” he says. “Then we prestage all of those and make sure we staff up accordingly.
“A lot of times, we’ll bring in companies to help us do the bin deliveries, [for example]. We just try to make sure we have a really good understanding of what our challenges will be weeks and, hopefully, months in advance of actually having to go to the rollout day.”

The art of communication
In Bolduc’s view, success in industries such as waste and recycling collection comes down to building and fostering relationships and communication with community leadership, residents and even competitors.
“We always say we try to over-communicate as much as possible with our end users just to make sure that we’re meeting whatever needs that we have operational control over,” he says. “That could mean helping people move containers around or making sure we schedule delivery dates or coordinating with the people that are currently providing the service to let them know when we’ll be delivering our carts.”
At Cards, Reynolds says the company adheres to the acronym “FOCUS,” which stands for field work, such as driving the roadways in a location; opportunities, such as finding ways to make collection safer and more efficient; creativity, where the company aims to put together a proposal that speaks to the needs of its customers; urgency, as the company moves quickly to launch its collection programs; and the “S” can stand for sales, sustainability, safety, service, stability or synergies, depending on the initiative Cards is tackling at a given time.
Cards provides municipalities with references from its existing portfolio that can help build trust and transparency with local leaders. The company also aims to check in with municipal partners quarterly to better understand their needs and what’s important to them.
For residents, Cards delivers what Reynolds calls an “extensive” welcome packet ahead of service launch. The company works proactively to gather as much customer data as possible through a variety of communication methods. “We use text, we use email and then traditional letters. For the two weeks leading up to [the start of service], we’re communicating with them constantly.
“I would say that, at the end of the day, it all boils down to talent and engagement. Our team has extreme ownership with these acquisitions and municipal contracts and integrating new employees and customers. We call it our white-glove integration. It touches every aspect of our business.”
The education piece
When communicating its entry into a new market, Reynolds says Cards makes sure customers are fully aware of the company’s service schedule.
The company communicates when bins should be placed at the curb, aligning with local ordinances, and outlines the collection schedule for recycling.
“We’ll give [customers a computer-generated] map, and we’ll highlight the weeks so they can see [their collection days], and they can take that and print it off to keep on hand,” Reynolds says. “From there, we ask how they’d like to communicate with us and give them all our options: You can call, you can email [or] you can text, it’s really up to the resident.”
Adams uses an app to communicate with its customers and an array of social media platforms, such as Facebook, X and Instagram, to meet different demographics in the markets it operates in and make sure they’re as educated as possible.
“We communicate often,” Bolduc says. “We make sure that in those communications we’re setting real expectations for our customers, [such as] this is our start date, and as we work through these first couple of cycles, if you have issues, we know that those may come up.
“We want to make sure [customers] understand the contact points. So, we’re hitting them with text messages. emails or calls to let them know that sometimes things don’t go right, [and] we want to make sure you know exactly how to get ahold of us.”
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