Miami-Dade generates about 5 million tons of waste every year. Only 37% of it gets recycled. The county is betting that a smartphone app might help change that.
Scrapp, a recycling guidance app, is launching a pilot program across Miami-Dade's 39 municipalities and unincorporated areas. The $100,000 grant from the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority (MDIA) is funding the experiment, which aims to make recycling information actually useful to the people who need it.
The problem sounds simple but runs deep: recycling rules vary wildly depending on where you live. One neighborhood's collection day is another's deadline. One person's recyclable material is another's contamination. Most people don't know the difference, so they either guess (and get it wrong) or don't bother trying. Miami-Dade's 311 information line gets flooded with recycling questions that could be answered if people knew where to look.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxScrapp's co-founder Mikey Pasciuto sees the app as that central place. The existing app already has an interactive map of drop-off sites and a barcode scanner that tells you whether something's recyclable. But Miami-Dade's pilot will add something more local: collection day reminders tailored to your specific address, recycling guidance written for your neighborhood's rules, and the ability to navigate in Spanish and Haitian Creole—the languages actually spoken in the county.
There's also room for features like weather alerts (heavy rain changes what can be collected) and educational content that helps residents understand why recycling matters in the first place.
Aneisha Daniel, director of Miami-Dade's Department of Solid Waste Management, calls these pilots "practical, sustainable solutions." The county's long-term goal is aggressive: reduce the amount of material sent to disposal by 40%. That's not a small shift. It requires people to actually change their behavior, which means the information has to be accessible, specific, and in the language they speak at home.
The real test isn't whether the app works technically—it's whether residents download it, use it, and then actually follow through. If Scrapp can reduce the number of people calling 311 with recycling questions, that's a sign the system is working. If recycling rates climb and disposal rates fall, that's proof.
