Smart Recycling Technology Deploys to 42,000 Miami-Dade Households

MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. - American Beverage today announced a new effort to strengthen recycling in Miami-Dade County by deploying advanced technology and educational materials to boost participation in recycling and reduce contamination of recyclables. The initiative is supported by a $504,000 grant from the beverage industry's Every Bottle Back^® initiative, in collaboration with The Recycling Partnership.

Miami-Dade County currently provides curbside recycling to nearly 365,000 households, but like many large systems, faces challenges with low participation and high contamination, which can spoil recyclable materials. This new project will leverage smart camera technology across 42,000 households to better understand recycling behavior, identify contamination and deliver tailored education to residents about how to best recycle.

"We're proud to partner with Miami-Dade County to bring innovative solutions to one of the biggest challenges facing recycling systems today," said Elizabeth DeWitt, president and CEO of the Florida Beverage Association. "By combining technology with targeted education, this project will help ensure more bottles and cans are properly recycled and remade into new ones, rather than ending up in landfills."

Over the next decade, the project is expected to keep an estimated 1.2 million pounds of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and more than 400,000 pounds of aluminum out of the environment and landfills. Collecting more recyclable material supports the beverage industry's efforts to reduce the use of new plastic and increase the use of recycled content in packaging.

The Miami-Dade County project builds on Every Bottle Back^®'s other recycling investments in Florida in Jacksonville and Pensacola, that together will reach more than 839,000 residents. Collectively, these three investments are projected to keep more than 6 million additional pounds of plastic out of landfills and the environment over the next decade.

This project represents another step forward for Every Bottle Back^®-an initiative of The Coca-Cola Company, Keurig Dr Pepper and PepsiCo-that launched in 2019. In total, investments across nearly 70 communities are estimated to yield 730 million new pounds of recycled PET and more than 47 million more pounds of recycled aluminum over the next decade.

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