Omaha Joins Curbside Value Partnership

The city of Omaha, Neb., has joined the Aluminum Can Council’s (ACC) Curbside Value Partnership (CVP). Beginning this summer, the city’s public works staff and the ACC will kick off a city-wide campaign to educate residents about the benefits of curbside recycling.

“We have three central goals for this partnership,” Steve Thompson, director of recycling initiatives for the ACC, says. “We want to increase participation in curbside recycling throughout the city, we want to see more bins on the street and we want to see residents more diligently recycling the valuable portion of what goes in that bin, including aluminum cans and newspaper. We know the residents of Omaha will respond.”

Omaha is the 19th city to join the CVP, an invitation-only program where the aluminum industry and its funding members, including Alcoa, Anheiser-Busch Metal Container, ARCO, Ball, Novelis and REXAM, work with individual municipalities to help increase their recycling rates through education and detailed evaluations.

“We are excited to join the CVP and to now have access to important data about recycling programs across the U.S.,” Steve Andrews, executive director of the Nebraska State Recycling Association, says. Andrews worked with Firstar Fiber, the city’s material recovery facility (MRF) to introduce the partnership to Omaha’s Public Works Department.

In addition to its partnership with Omaha, the CVP has also established strategic partnerships with Keep Omaha Beautiful (KOB) and the Nebraska State Recycling Association.

Omaha was selected for the partnership because of the its strong environmental track record and its recent switch to single-stream recycling.

“Since we recently switched to single-stream collections, where residents can recycle all of their items in one bin, we know that we also have to increase our communications to residents. They may still be confused about what to recycle and how to do it,” Paul Dunn, recycling coordinator for the city of Omaha’s Public Works Department, says. “This is why it’s important for us to now partner with the ACC. Working with them and learning from what other communities are doing across the country will help us more effectively reach our residents and grow participation in the process.” 

The partnership will involve a city-wide communications campaign to residents with an added focus on a few target communities who have been identified as receptive to recycling, but slower to take part.  Additionally, the ACC will provide public relations support and marketing and logistics resources to the city to help disseminate messages and measure their effectiveness.

The national CVP program was developed two years ago by the Aluminum Can Council, a joint effort of the Aluminum Association and the Can Manufacturers Institute, to help reverse declining recycling rates and provide communities with sustainable solutions to improve their programs. The Curbside Value Partnership joins communities, haulers, material recovery facilities and other stakeholders to identify solutions to improving curbside recycling programs and address falling recycling rates.

Current CVP partner communities include Kansas City, Mo.; Brevard County, Fla.; Indian River, Fla.; Denver; Orlando, Fla.; and Dallas.

More information is available at www.RecycleCurbside.org.