Virginia Beach, Va. - In a city that boasts about its beautiful beaches, Linda Minner was given the job of making a trash heap something to brag about.
“We want it to be a convenient place, but also, as pleasant a place as it can be,” she says.
They replaced confusing signs with friendly ones, designed a one-way driving loop with recycling stations, and changed the name to The Virginia Beach Landfill and Resource Recovery Center.
“We talked about what do customers have to see and know to make this an easy, pleasant experience for them,” Minner says.
The city submitted its landfill for a MarCom award and it won under a category dedicated to the refreshment of a brand.
We put the landfill to the test. An old boombox that doesn’t work, a bag of clothes, spray paint, canned paint, pesticide, scrap wood, a lawn chair, computer tower, TV… and it was off to the dump, or rather, the Landfill and Resource Recovery Center.
There's a smiling greeter, a donation box for clothing, bins for grocery bags, cardboard, even toilets and oyster shells.
There are rows of concrete corrals for all types of metal, boxes for computers and TVs, and a station for paint and chemicals.
In the end, the only thing that would end up buried, was the scrap wood. That, Minner says, saves the Earth and saves money.
Plus the city gets back some money when workers take the metal to recyclers.
It's not the first time the city has orchestrated a trashy turnaround. After all, the city's most popular park, Mount Trashmore, was also a city dump.
Minner says the new focus is catching on with residents because of this simple idea: Make recycling easy and convenient, and people with do it.
