The City of Kalamazoo, Michigan joined the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE); The Recycling Partnership; and Saskatchewan-based Canadian cleantech startup Prairie Robotics to launch a contamination reduction campaign. The campaign uses high-tech cameras, global positioning systems, and computers on city recycling trucks to check the contents of curbside recycling carts and tailor constructive feedback as needed, household by household.
“The City of Kalamazoo has a long history of recycling, and last May launched a new campaign with The Recycling Partnership to expand recycling and improve resident education,” said Justin Gish, sustainability planner for the City of Kalamazoo. “This new project builds on Kalamazoo’s comprehensive recycling participation education and outreach program. It delivered in-home bins to nearly 1,600 homes and educational mailers to roughly 14,000 single-family households currently opted into the recycling program to bolster their recycling efforts.”
The campaign is spearheaded by the City of Kalamazoo Department of Public Services and is funded with $104,500 in grants and technical support from EGLE and national nonprofit, The Recycling Partnership. The aim is to promote more and better recycling while decreasing the number of contaminated materials that are inadvertently deposited in recycling carts.
The project is a modified version of The Recycling Partnership’s “Feet on the Street” cart-tagging recycling program – a community-wide initiative to improve the quality of recycling in curbside recycling carts by providing residents with personalized and real-time curbside recycling education and feedback. Traditionally, this is done by temporary workers tagging carts on the street if contaminants – items that aren’t accepted for curbside recycling, such as plastic bags – are in the recycling cart.
Through the project, instead of a person reviewing contents and placing a tag on curbside recycling carts, Prairie Robotics will retrofit the city’s recycling collection trucks with state-of-the-art smart camera technology. Using machine-learning techniques, the technology scans the material as it is mechanically dumped from each recycling cart into the truck and recognizes unacceptable items such as plastic bags, polystyrene foam, yard waste, and trash. Such items are flagged in real-time, allowing for a personalized postcard or digital notification to be sent to a resident with information about how they can recycle better.
The City of Kalamazoo becomes the fifth Michigan municipality to embrace Prairie Robotics technology for contamination reduction. The City of East Lansing was the first Michigan municipality to pilot the program with support from EGLE, Prairie Robotics, and The Recycling Partnership. Results show contamination was reduced by nearly 25 percent.
EGLE allocated more than $924,000 in grant funding last year to nine recycling program grantees, representing more than 493,000 households across the state. The funding is part of EGLE’s strategy to support recycling infrastructure, improve the quality of recyclable materials, and promote market development using the Renew Michigan Fund, which the state Legislature created in 2019 in a bipartisan move to bolster the state’s recycling efforts.
Michigan’s recycling rate has hit an all-time high for an unprecedented third consecutive year. According to EGLE’s most recent analysis, Michigan’s recycling rate has risen from 14.25 percent before 2019 to 21 percent last year and over 23 percent now, putting Michigan on track to achieve its goal of a 30 percent recycling rate by 2029. The record-setting combined total of materials Michiganders recycled in 2023 would fill the football stadiums at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan State University’s Spartan Stadium in East Lansing and the Big House at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Michigan residents recycled more than 330,000 tons of paper and paper products during 2023, including over 237,000 tons of metals, more than 67,000 tons of glass, and over 58,000 tons of plastics and plastic products. The total amount of residential recycled materials reported for FY 2023 was 703,369 tons – exceeding the record set the year before by more than 82,000 tons.
EGLE leaders attribute the state’s recent recycling success to EGLE’s 2019 launch of the national award-winning “Know It Before You Throw It” education campaign featuring the Recycling Raccoon Squad, as well as EGLE funding and technical support for projects that increase access to recycling services across Michigan.
Published February 2025