Strategic Objectives

The Department of Solid Waste is comprised of a mixture of professionally trained and experienced employees who oversee the planning, management, and supervision of the City's solid waste, bulky item, street sweeping, street litter collection, dead animal removal and recycling collection programs. The Department is also responsible for the collection of fees derived from the commercial solid waste franchise system and for the provision of code enforcement services vis-a-vis Chapter 22 of the City Code to help ensure the highest quality of life for both the residents and business of the city of Miami. The Department ensures that solid waste materials are collected, transported, recovered, and disposed in accordance with City goals and in a manner that assures public health for the city of Miami community.

The Department of Solid Waste is the exclusive service provider for the City's single-family residential sector for refuse, recycling, and bulky item collection. The Department also leads Keep Miami Beautiful with a goal to enhance environmental awareness, beautify the public right-of-way, deter illegal dumping behavior, and ensure code compliance. Keep Miami Beautiful inspires, educates and empowers people in Miami to take action every day to improve and beautify their community environments.

Through the source reduction and recycling division, the Department promotes environmental education at schools, community events, neighborhood associations, social media, as well as the use of promotional and educational materials directly handed out to businesses and residents.

• Maintain a cost-effective operation and to continue to deliver regular, reliable service levels to our community.
• Conduct a minimum of fifty school visits and events participations annually. Inception of the Students Ambassador’s program at five additional elementary schools.
• Expansion of the Source Reduction & Recycling Division by the inclusion of Public Relations Aides.
• Maintain the 2015 policy of responding to complaints, including container requests and replacements within ten business days or earlier. Maintain 311-Hub open work order levels not to excess 500 weekly.
• Conduct in-cab one-on-one driver performance evaluations to assess driver behavior and road safety.
• Continuing using telemetrics to assess progress and to identify both risk drivers and risk behavior.
• Maintain and excess a minimum of eleven thousand tons of recycling materials being diverted from the waste stream annually.
• Implementation of the 2016-2018 Keep Miami Beautiful Plan of Action
• Update certain sections of Chapter 22 of the Miami City Code pertaining to residential green waste management, and commercial & multifamily recycling.
• Maintain a healthy franchise fee collection financial reconciliation system to ensure fees are properly and timely submitted.
• Conduct the annual commercial waste hauler workshops to keep firms up to date with requirement under both the franchise agreement and the Miami City Code.
• Continue to provide educational opportunities to all sanitation code enforcement inspectors and administrative staff, including Florida Association of Code Enforcement level I certification.
• Carry out safety programs to address both injury prevention and accident prevention with the inclusion of well -trained safety specialists.
• Continue to replacing dysfunctional street litter containers with an overall goal to double the amount of containers within three years when compared to 2013 levels.
• Start with the implementation of the County multifamily recycling mandate by engaging two business improvement districts and 5 multifamily dwellings by the end of 2017.
• Deployment of the I-Biz component as it relates to sanitation code enforcement.
• Maintain a healthy ratio for the use of disposal facilities for both residential solid waste and bulky trash collection.
• Maintain the level of readiness and knowledge to act as first responders in the event of any mosquito virus transmission zone declaration within city limits.
• Procurement, acquisition and delivery of state-of-the art solid waste equipment.
• Conduct regular labor management meetings with bargaining unions to help maintain optimal communication levels with the workforce.