Got questions about what to recycle in Fort Worth? Now you can ask Facebook for answers
By all accounts, Fort Worth’s solid waste services department has a tough mandate. Staff members must educate thousands of residents about how to recycle their waste and reduce the amount of trash wrongly thrown into the recycling bin, all on a tight budget.
Those are some of the challenges the city hopes to address through a new initiative with Facebook and national nonprofit The Recycling Partnership.
Thanks to an automated bot launched last week, Fort Worth is now one of two cities where residents can send questions to the Communities for Recycling Facebook and Instagram pages to receive nearly instantaneous answers about what they can and can’t recycle. The tool is available in English and Spanish.
“We want to get recycling information to the places where people are already looking and where they’re already engaged,” said Cody Marshall, chief community strategy officer for The Recycling Partnership. “They might not go to some special recycling app to look something up, but they’re already on Facebook and Instagram. This is the perfect platform to get the right hyper-local information.”
Through the Messenger app, Facebook or Instagram users in Fort Worth and Atlanta can begin the conversation by messaging: Get Started. From there, the bot will ask where the user lives and how confident they are that they recycle correctly.
Residents can then ask questions like: Can I recycle plastic grocery bags? What about pizza boxes? The bot may respond with clarifying questions, asking what kind of metal you want to recycle or if you use a curbside cart before providing an answer based on information from the local recycling department.
The new tool goes beyond the city’s existing social media audience and can remove some of the workload typically shouldered by customer service representatives, according to Robert Smouse, Fort Worth’s assistant director of solid waste services. Best of all for city officials, the bot comes free of charge.
“It provides that kind of instant gratification where we don’t have to have staffing available by phones or emails,” Smouse said. “We don’t have to have staff watching certain web pages to respond to comments. It answers those questions quickly and effectively.”
Facebook has launched an ad campaign spotlighting Vanessa Barker of The Welman Project, which redistributes leftover materials from Fort Worth businesses to teachers. In addition to asking questions, users can take a recycling knowledge quiz and join a Facebook group sharing resources about how to start local recycling initiatives.
Since there is not a national standard for recycling, local governments must determine their own policies, said Arielle Gross Samuels, Facebook’s head of global business strategy and engagement. In making those nuanced policies more easily available to residents, the social media giant aims to help transform Americans’ recycling habits, Samuels said.
“We’re asking: What is engagement with the bot itself?” Samuels said. “Are people actually interacting thoroughly with the quiz? How much time are they spending with it? Certainly I’ve got my ambitions in terms of hopefully seeing real change happen, real behavioral change in terms of the tonnage of recycling and hopefully reduction of contamination of landfills.”
How was Fort Worth chosen as one of two cities to pilot the bot? Facebook has a growing presence in the city, announcing plans last year to expand its massive data center in far north Fort Worth and increase its total investment to $1.5 billion.
In addition, Smouse worked with The Recycling Partnership on the regional “Know What to Throw” campaign organized through the North Central Texas Council of Governments. Fort Worth has a fairly high performing recycling program and wants to dig into the data to figure out how to improve, Marshall said.
“Fort Worth has been known for our dedicated program success of trying to measure and move the needle on improving the program, whether that’s increasing participation, increasing volume, or decreasing contamination,” Smouse said. “I’m hoping this is going to give us more metrics on what really works and what doesn’t.”
Based on the outcome of the pilot, Facebook will decide if it makes sense to expand the project to more cities, Samuels said. In the meantime, Smouse is excited to see how the bot will help people make the right decisions when it comes to throwing those metal coat hangers into the trash or the recycling bin.
“At 10 o’clock at night, when you’re on the couch with your wife and she wants to throw them into recycling, you can say: ‘Wait a second, it’s metal, but coathangers don’t go into recycling carts,’” Smouse said. “When someone has a question, they can get that information, because nobody waits anymore. We need that 24-7 expansion.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2021 at 10:53 AM.
