This multi-year approach served two purposes: 1) to build support across a wide variety of stakeholders with divergent perspectives, including City agencies, elected officials, private carting companies, commercial businesses, and environmental safety advocates, and 2) to gather essential input from these stakeholders to inform and validate the overall design of the zone system.
This multi-year approach served two purposes: 1) to build support across a wide variety of stakeholders with divergent perspectives, including City agencies, elected officials, private carting companies, commercial businesses, and environmental safety advocates, and 2) to gather essential input from these stakeholders to inform and validate the overall design of the zone system.
Through a carefully facilitated and phased series of advisory board meetings, focus groups, and stakeholder interviews, our engagement strategy focused on effectively managing change by setting expectations for future waste management regulatory policies and understanding how the system can create positive outcomes for business owners, carters, and neighborhoods, such as improving customer service standards, reducing negative impacts to the environment, and promoting worker safety.
By engaging businesses, private waste haulers, labor representatives, industry associations, and community stakeholders, we generated actionable insights that informed the Commercial Waste Zones framework, implementation strategy, and communications approach. Since the program’s phased rollout began, multiple zones across the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens have successfully transitioned to the new system, with citywide implementation continuing through 2027. The stakeholder-driven foundation we helped establish has supported a smoother rollout, helping businesses navigate the transition while advancing the City’s goals of reducing truck traffic and emissions, improving worker safety and labor standards, increasing industry accountability, and creating a more efficient and sustainable commercial waste collection system.
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