Chapter 2: Opportunity knocks.

Our first attempt at the Blue Bucket program didn’t catch on with residents quite the way we’d hoped—in 2013, we reluctantly discontinued the service to focus on our expanding Community Drop-Off Center and the (short-lived, but heroic!) Dallas Eco-Op—but the lessons we learned from working with discarded food opened a truly unexpected & exciting door for us.

In 2012, the Downtown Sheraton approached us about the possibility of diverting the hotel’s organic waste stream from local landfills. The prospect of educating & training dozens of hotel employees—in addition to collecting, sorting, and composting dozens of tons of post-consumer food scraps per month—was daunting, but our experience with the Blue Bucket program had taught us that, when it came to working with organics, where there was a will, there was a way.

(Keep reading, below!)

Chapter 3: Ten Thousand Tons(!) 

In short order—and thanks in large part to the hotel’s leadership team—the Sheraton’s program became a success, making it the first hotel in North Texas to implement a full-time composting program.

In the process, RR furthered its reputation as a company committed to providing outstanding service, doing things the right way, and a willingness to do “crazy” things (like hand-sorting buffet food scraps!) on behalf of Clients & the environment.

In the years that followed, more pioneering hotels, restaurants, offices, and schools became interested in composting, and by December 2019, we’d worked alongside North Texas’s most environmentally-responsible organizations to divert close to 10,000 tons (20,000,000 pounds) of organic material from local landfills.

(Keep reading, below!)

Chapter 4: RR Goes Residential (Again)

Local environmentalists have frequented our Community Drop-Off Center since 2008, but it wasn’t until our move to the Love Field area in 2018 that our Center truly began to realize its potential as a place for all North Texans.

The Center’s convenient location, combined with increased parking & a full-time Community Drop-Off Host to welcome & help visitors with their recyclables, has made the Center more accessible than ever before, and growing social awareness of issues like zero waste, climate change, and ethical consumerism has sparked new interest in recycling & composting.

In March 2020, just prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. and subsequent social-distancing measures, hundreds of residents from Dallas & the surrounding cities visited our Center each month to responsibly dispose of their Hard-to-Recycle Materials & food scraps.

These new visitors brought with them new questions, including one that seemed to come up daily: “When are you guys going to start a compost collection program for residents?!”