City Of Providence, Rhode Island Request For Proposal

Proposal Due Date December 16, 2024 – 2:15 p.m.

Estimated Award Date January 13, 2025

Contact

Name: Kevin Proft

Tittle: Deputy Director of Sustainability

Email Address: kproft@providenceri.gov

Bidders must submit 2 copies of their bid in sealed envelopes or packages to:

Board of Contract and Supply

Department of the City Clerk – City Hall, Room 311

25 Dorrance Street

Providence, RI 02903

1. Purpose

This RFP seeks a vendor to design and implement an equitable, community-based education and outreach campaign aimed at Providence residents to decrease waste, reduce contaminated recycling, and increase the city’s recycling rate. The campaign will focus on interpersonal approaches, not a mail- or media-based campaign. The campaign will target neighborhoods with the lowest recycling rates based on data provided by the City. The campaign will involve and compensate frontline community members to conduct outreach.

2. Background Information

Providence’s recycling rate is the lowest in the state. In 2023, only 2.9% of municipal solid waste was successfully recycled and accepted by Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation’s (RIRRC) Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Johnston. The average recycling rate for Rhode Island’s other 10 municipalities with greater than 10,000 households participating in a curbside program is 19.8%. The city’s poor recycling rate is both an environmental and financial concern for the City. The City estimates that it sends more than 14 tons of contaminated recyclables to the landfill each year and pays greater than $900,000 in unnecessary landfill tipping fees and fines for rejected recycling loads annually.

Despite this low recycling rate, the Sustainability Department is focused on reducing waste and improving recycling in the city. In 2019, the Department, in collaboration with the Racial Environmental Justice Committee, completed the Climate Justice Plan, which gained national attention for its efforts to partner with underserved communities and center racial justice. The plan includes a chapter on building a regenerative economy with a goal of building a sustainable, zero-waste economy in Providence while supporting local businesses and creating meaningful work for frontline community members. The City is pursuing a variety of programs to move Providence towards these goals. For example, the City is:

• implementing a USDA Compost and Food Waste Reduction grant, which aims to increase food scrap diversion in the city. The City is collaborating with community compost partners to expand waste diversion in Providence Public Schools, mentor neighbors in backyard composting, expand the city’s network of compost drop off sites, and fund public education campaigns around composting and waste reduction.
• identifying funding to replace all residential trash and recycling carts, in part, to improve recycling outcomes. The City’s existing carts are deteriorating and mismatched, and the City has found that its smaller trash carts result in overflow trash being dumped in its larger recycling carts, thus contaminating the recycling stream. The new carts will be standardized and provide more space for trash to avoid this overflow issue. The City will implement a mail-based education campaign to accompany the arrival of new carts.
• The City is considering implementing software that will enable granular data collection on its residential solid waste program. The software will help the City conduct hyper-targeted education and enforcement relating to contamination in the recycling stream. 

The City of Providence’s Department of Sustainability received an U.S. EPA Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling (SWIFR) grant and a RIRRC grant to implement a community-based education and outreach campaign focused on reducing residential waste and improving recycling outcomes – the focus of this RFP. The multi-lingual campaign will focus on interpersonal outreach methods, target neighborhoods with low recycling rates, and involve and compensate frontline community members as educators

3. Equity

Many of Providence’s census tracts are identified as “disadvantaged” by the Federal Government’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool and correspond with the frontline communities the Department focuses much of its work on. These diverse communities are on the frontline of the climate crisis and are disproportionately impacted by health and economic disparities. The awarded vendor will equitably distribute resources in the following manner:

Public education campaign materials will be available in multiple languages and the majority of engagement will occur in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

• Multilingual residents from disadvantaged neighborhoods will be identified, trained, and paid to conduct outreach in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

2.0 Scope of Work

This RFP seeks a vendor to design and implement an equitable, community-based education and outreach campaign aimed at Providence residents to decrease waste, reduce contaminated recycling, and increase the city’s recycling rate.

The City is seeking a campaign focused on interpersonal approaches, not a mail- or media-based campaign. The campaign will target neighborhoods with the lowest recycling rates based on data provided by the City. The campaign will involve and compensate frontline community members to conduct outreach.

The awarded vendor will:

1. Work and coordinate with the City to develop an approximately 20-month, community-based education and outreach campaign focused on reducing residential waste and improving recycling outcomes. The campaign should be timed to begin when the City introduces new residential trash and recycling carts in spring 2025.
2. Use community-based, interpersonal outreach strategies such as door knocking, tabling, holding community events, and participating in existing meetings (e.g. neighborhood associations, City Council ward meetings, etc).
3. Explain the environmental and financial benefits of reducing waste and improving recycling outcomes. Share strategies for reducing waste and provide accurate information about what can and cannot be recycled, highlighting examples of items that are frequently miscategorized . Become familiar with local solid waste challenges, mainly through meetings with Providence DPW and RIRRC staff, to ensure outreach and education is catered to the local context.
4. Order and distribute multilingual printed recycling education materials while conducting outreach. Coordinate selection of materials with the City to ensure continuity with other efforts.
5. Monitor recycling data from State and City sources to inform where outreach is targeted throughout the project period.
6. Train and hire multilingual community members from frontline communities and/or recruit and compensate multilingual volunteers from frontline communities to conduct outreach. Outreach should be available to residents in the language they are most comfortable speaking.
7. Ensure at least half of outreach is conducted in disadvantaged neighborhoods per the White House’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
8. Collaborate with the City and its other vendors to inform concurrent recycling education and outreach efforts including a planned mail-based campaign.
9. Meet regularly with City staff to provide updates and ensure the campaign remains coordinated with other City efforts relating to waste diversion.
10. Provide regular reports to enable the City to meet grant reporting requirements.