For years, downtown Denton businesses shared garbage and recycling dumpsters.
The amount of waste grew and changed along with the problem of illegal dumping.
“As a result, you always had overflowing dumpsters, litter, and these dumpsters also took up parking spots in the street,” said Brian Boerner, director of solid waste for the City of Denton.
Last summer, the city of Denton started the first phase of a valet service to better manage the trash and recycling pickup for downtown businesses.
Instead of sharing dumpsters, each business gets its own individual garbage and recycling carts, similar to what you would see in front of someone’s house.
The are joining other Dallas-Fort Worth area businesses becoming more aware about the connection between a changing global climate and business sustainability and adopting eco-friendly practices.
Experts say such practices can help the triple bottom line for maintaining business sustainability: people, planet and profit.
“If you’re putting an equal emphasis on people, planet and profit for your business, chances are you are not only going to profit, but you’re going to feel good about your business because you’re doing the right thing for everyone involved,” said Amy King, co-founder of GoodWork.
GoodWork is a co-working space in Dallas that serves as an incubator for business owners where they can also learn about creating and maintaining a sustainable business.
“Especially in Texas, I feel like we can make a really big difference by incubating these concepts,” she said. “[The businesses] learn a lot from the other people in the co-working community and from us, by creating an environment where we can do anything — like teach them how to recycle better and to share ideas and practices around how to be a better sustainable business.”
Denton’s new valet trash and recycling service assists local businesses with that triple bottom line to become more sustainable, with more focus on the people and planet aspect.
According to an August presentation to the Denton City Council, crews collected 0.90 tons of recyclables during the first phase of the valet trash program. That translated into a 29% recycling rate along with less than 8% contamination rate recorded during the first phase.
Since more businesses are still being added to the program, “it is somewhat hard to show a trend on how things are going,” Boerner said.
However, the city has noted a decrease in contamination incidents, he said.
The solid waste workers have been able to “better service and manage the materials that the businesses are producing” by picking up more often, Boerner said.
Recycling items are collected several times a day, every day of the week.
If a business owner throws a non-recyclable item into a bin full of recyclables, that runs the risk of contaminating the load.
“We’re able to manage that material on a much quicker basis, so it doesn’t have the opportunity to become contaminated,” he said. “If we do find contaminants, we’re able to go back in and re-educate the managers or the workers of that specific business and clean that material up. We can stop the contamination at the source.”
Fuzzy’s Tacos on Industrial Street in Denton was one of the businesses that participated in the pilot phase of the valet service. Faith Overton, the assistant general manager of Fuzzy’s, said the smaller bins have helped prevent overflowing.
“We used to share a recycling bin and a dumpster with all [of the businesses] on Industrial [Street],” she said. “It was definitely more crowded because we were all throwing trash in there and the pickup was only once a week or so. Now that it’s just individual bins, it’s a lot easier for us, since we’re only [throwing away] our trash and our recycling.”
Overton said she had doubts about the size of the bins before the valet service started.
“We were kind of skeptical at first, because they brought the residential bins, so we didn’t know if that was going to [work] with all of our waste,” she said.
The frequent pickup times and the smaller bins have benefited her business, she said. Now that the bins are picked up at least once or twice a day, there’s not the weekly buildup, she said.
“That’s what we were worried about, because if you’re only going to pick it up once a week, it’s going to be overflowing, but since they do it at least once a day, we haven’t had any overflowing,” Overton said.
The last phase of the valet trash program is currently in progress in the Fry Street area and it is expected to be completed this fall.
"Trash" - Google News
December 29, 2019 at 02:00AM
https://ift.tt/2tShsiv
New valet trash, other services boosting business sustainability - Denton Record Chronicle
"Trash" - Google News
https://ift.tt/33Uwgu2
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "New valet trash, other services boosting business sustainability - Denton Record Chronicle"
Post a Comment