New Stickers Will Tell You When To Wheel Out Your Trash

A garbage packer truck in the city of Milwaukee. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

When do you need to wheel out your recycling or garbage carts?

A new sticker aims to make it much easier and faster to find the answer.

Starting this summer, the Department of Public Works will mail every property owner a sticker with a QR code that, when scanned, opens a simple webpage that displays the next pickup dates. The service uses the geolocation feature on a smartphone to detect the proper address and show the correct dates.

Alderman Peter Burgelis introduced the idea.

He criticized the current process. Without the paper flyer that is periodically mailed out, one must navigate the city website and enter their address. On a mobile phone, it can be, as Burgelis put it, quite “tedious” to pick from a long list of streets.

He praised Chief Information Officer David Henke and the city’s IT department for quickly turning the idea into reality. “Kudos to the department for putting this together,” he said at Wednesday’s meeting of the Public Works Committee.

“The idea is to put this on a sticker… so that people can put the sticker on the trash can or a garage door or refrigerator,” said the alderman. “Keep it handy where you want a quick reminder ‘is trash day Tuesday or Thursday this week? I don’t remember.’ Quick scan and your city services are accessible and you can move on to your other business.”

“Thank you for bringing this idea forward. We were happy to turn the technology around quickly,” said Henke. He said it builds on the lookup service on the city website and noted that another option is to receive text messages via the E-notify service.

“This is just another tool for our residents to go by,” said DPW Commissioner Jerrel Kruschke. He might even find himself using it. Kruschke joked that he often looks outside to see if his neighbors have wheeled out their carts as a signal that he needs to bring his out.

The commissioner said including the sticker in the municipal services bill mailing is expected to cost up to $6,000. He said his department was exploring the appropriate frequency for resending stickers.

Depending on whether they live on an alley or not, and if they have space along the alley, Milwaukee residents must wheel their carts to the curb for weekly garbage pickup or biweekly recycling pickup. There are fewer alleys in the newer areas of the city, which includes much of Burgelis’s southwest side district.

The new QR code isn’t expected to solve one issue that plagues winter pickups: snow plowing. When the city shifts its workers and equipment to snow plowing, it misses pickup days. The new tool won’t have any additional information on when a pickup is to occur, and residents are still encouraged to put out their carts on the scheduled pickup day and wait for the catch-up to occur.

Garbage and Recycling Pickup QR Code. Image from City of Milwaukee.

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