Updated Solid Waste & Recycling Dashboard

Published on November 14, 2025

The city's Recycling Dashboard was one of the first tools created to show residents what happens to their recycling after it is picked up from the curb. With much work behind the scenes, this dashboard now has new features and data to give a clearer picture of solid waste and recycling in Clearwater.

Material and Collection Data

This section shows what is collected in Clearwater.

• A list of all materials collected, shown by weight. This includes regular trash, curbside bulk items, recycling, cardboard, scrap metal and storm debris. You can also choose to see if the material came from a home or a business.

Recycling Insights

The "Recycling Insights" button takes you to a page that focuses only on the city's recycling program. On that page, you can see:

• How much recycling is sent to and processed by our third-party vendor each month
• How much it costs to process recycling each month, including any money the city gets back when that applies

Daily Averages

This section helps you understand how the collection changes based on the pickup day.

• See the average amount of material collected on each day of the week

Customer & Service Data

This section shows how customer requests are handled.

• Service request, such as starting, stopping or changing service
• Container maintenance, such as fixing or cleaning a cart
• Extra pickup
• Callback, when a cart was not set out or when a pickup was missed
• Average number of business days it takes to complete each type of request

You can filter all of this data by customer type and service type.

Key Performance Indicators

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are goals and measures that help track how the system works. These are located at the bottom of the webpage in the blue dropdowns.

• Direct haul rate, the percentage of truck loads that go straight to a processing facility, such as Pinellas County Solid Waste or another contractor, instead of stopping at the city's transfer station first
• Community diversion rate, the percentage of materials that do not end up in the county landfill or waste-to-energy plant, which includes single-stream recycling, corrugated cardboard recycling, scrap metal recycling, and bulk materials including yard waste.

Why Some Totals May Not Match

Sometimes the total amount of material "processed" in a month will not match the total amount "collected" in that same month. This can happen when:

• Material is stored at the city's facility before it is sent to the vendor.
• The vendor's facility is offline and will process the stored material later.

Even when the totals do not match month to month, the dashboard still shows that recycling was collected and sent for processing.