Dear Seattle, If you want us to sort our trash we need HELP

Dear City of Seattle

Help.

Trash sorting has come up during Sunday Supper with RantMom. RantMom lives in a building near two other multi-family buildings. For some reason all the trash containers from all three buildings get parked near the front door of RantMom's building. Yuck. RantWoman can also attest that nothing like reasonable sorting into trash, recycling, and compost happens in these waste streams. Or if sorting happens there is PLENTY of room for improvement.

Today RantWoman was also in a meeting where trash sorting for other buildings and for big events also came up. The meeting was full of other people besides RantWoman who quickly surface issues of language access and accessibility. The meeting is about Seattle. People in Seattle speak something like 100 languages. People who speak one language may have caregivers or chore workers who speak a different language. The trasj still needs to get sorted.

RantWoman gets that generally there are blue, green, and black trash receptacles in many public places. RantWoman gets that blue is recycling, green is compost, and black is garbage. RantWoman can even tell that usually the containers come with blobby signs that are supposed to offer clues as to what wastes go in which containers. The blobby signs meme should be a first clue: RantWoman does not always even have a clue from the signs what goes where.

Sometimes RantWoman knows: food scraps go in compost. Coated paper goes in trash but uncoated paper can go in recycling if it is clean or in compost if it has food ontit. An

Bottom line: If you want us to sort our trash, we need help. We need help in lots of languages. We need help in accessible formats, by which RantWoman does not mean just blobby signs.

Do we need a Youtube channel just for trash sorting lessons in multiple languages?

Do we need radio campaigns?

Do we need a smartphone app that can scan bar codes and tell us trash or recycling?

Do we need volunteer welcome wagon trash ambassadors who
 can teach new neighbors the mysteries of sacred trash sorting rituals?
Do we need tutorials about what constitutes clean recycling streams. RantWoman is not exactly getting paid to figure out so RantWoman is just going to articulate need for help and suggest that people find some things that can be measured to help figure out whether tmessages are working,

There.
End of tirade.

Happy sorting.

Sincerely, RantWoman.