Committee reviews trash and recycling webpages, recommends clearer visuals and centralized request system

Farmers Branch Sustainability Committee members reviewed the city’s trash and recycling webpages on Sept. 13 and recommended visual and navigation improvements to make recycling rules, cart sizes and event registrations easier for residents to find.

Committee members said important content—such as the items that go in each cart and event registration links—was buried below the fold and suggested reversing the page layout so more practical content and photos appear at the top. Specific suggestions included: tile-based landing pages with clear icons, photos of cart sizes and a person for scale, and a downloadable PDF or dashboard summarizing year-to-date recycling metrics.

Alex (Sustainability staff) explained the city had recently integrated many service requests into the FBTX (Fix-It/Farmers Branch service request) platform to standardize reporting and tracking across departments. The committee supported using FBTX for cart requests, brush pickup requests and other trash-related forms, and staff noted that linking FAQ content to the FBTX request workflows can reduce back-and-forth email and enable staff to close and track requests.

Members also recommended better promotion of media (for example, landfill-solar videos) and grouping recurring events—shredding, hazardous-waste collection and tree giveaways—under a single sustainability-events hub. The committee asked staff to forward design suggestions to the communications contractor that will be working on site refreshes and to return with proposed layout changes at a future meeting.

No formal motions were made; staff said they would coordinate with communications, embed FBTX links where appropriate, and provide updated page mock-ups for committee review.