SB 1383: Composting Outreach to Multi-Family Residents

POSTED ON June 16th, 2022 BY Lisa Duba

SB 1383 requires everyone in California — residents and businesses — to separate and compost organic materials, such as plant trimmings, leaves, grass and food scraps. In much of the Bay Area, yard trimmings and food scrap collection has been offered to single-family households for years. But the new law is providing a much-needed push to roll out food scrap collection service to multi-unit buildings. These buildings, which can have a few as four and up to hundreds of individual units, provide challenges, but also opportunities to keep more organic material out of the landfill.

Food scrap collection is an entirely new concept to the vast majority of apartment, condo and and townhome residents, and a clear and effective outreach program is a must-have. Outreach is ideally implemented at each building site. A successful program requires a good partnership between the service provider, the city or waste agency, and the property manager.

Gigantic is proud to have been part of a great collaboration with the South Bayside Waste Management Authority and their service provider, Recology, to create a composting campaign for apartment and condo residents.

Our team helped focus the campaign for the end-user of the program: the resident. The campaign will support the work of Recology’s implementation team and include a doorhanger for individual units and a poster for lobbies, trash areas and mail rooms. Both highlight the new food scrap composting requirement and link via QR code to a step-by-step instructional video. To support this site-specific outreach, we’ll be promoting the video on social media via paid promotion.

The video works to show, not tell, and visually communicates the food scrap recycling process. The addition of select graphic captions help identify key steps in the process. Voice-over in three languages (English, Spanish and Cantonese) help reach residents who may otherwise miss the message, while providing more detailed information.

Our video also includes 1383-required messaging about the law and its goal to reduce greenhouse gases.

We enjoyed working with this highly motivated client team. The program rolled out in June and we look forward to seeing the results!