Deep Ellum is a busy, urban, entertainment district. Every night, and especially on the weekends, thousands of visitors come to enjoy restaurants, bars, and one of a kind music venues. One of the oldest neighborhoods in Dallas, the neighborhood was not designed to handle the volume of visitors it now receives, especially given modern innovations like personal vehicles and large trash trucks. Trash is an especially large issue since there are very few alleys and space for dumpsters. 

We spent time in Deep Ellum conducting trash counts to identify hot spots, talking to bar and restaurant employees, and time observing the behavior of employees and visitors to the neighborhood. Through this, we were able to map the neighborhood by trash - identify hotspots, who the users of each dumpster were, and clarify ongoing frustrations and concerns. One of the things that we learned is that due to the high number of businesses and limited real estate available, businesses had developed trash alliances where they shared dumpsters and associated costs with neighboring businesses. They intentionally built these alliances to ensure that trash wasn’t overflowing at any point during the week. For example, one alliance included a bar with heavier weekday evening business, a school with weekday daytime usage only, a music venue with heavier weekend evening business, and two smaller restaurants. One shared pain point for all of the businesses in this alliance was the lack of recycling. 

Though City Council had approved free recycling for businesses in the area, given the space constraints, the assumption was that these complex trash alliances would be unable to sort their trash in a way that would make the recycling trash usable by recycling plants. We decided to test whether businesses were able to self-sort trash using the existing dumpsters and very little additional infrastructure. We advertised “Trashy Tuesdays”, supplied basic resources like blue trash bags and signage, and informed all of the businesses of the temporary change. By using large vinyl stickers to mark one of the two dumpsters used by the trash alliance as recycling. We ran the pilot for two separate weeks, and after each evening, would open the dumpsters to do a visual analysis of whether self-sorting was possible. Not only were businesses able to self-sort their trash, we learned several things through the analysis of the trash disposed. First, the vast majority of the recyclable trash generated was cardboard boxes. Many recycling companies have flat box recycling containers that are much smaller than a traditional recycling dumpster, but given the size of unflattened boxes in a typical dumpster, can reduce total trash volume significantly. Secondly, though there was some concern that separating trash would mean that the dumpsters would overflow, we found that the businesses generated a similar volume of recyclable and traditional trash. Finally, separating out recyclables meant that glass bottles were easier to find for the homeless who are often found digging for glass in the dumpsters. Undoubtedly, there is a need for a more respectful solution, but the elimination of food and restroom trash alongside the glass was a significant improvement already.