What RCon 2026 Told Haulers and MRFs About Where Recycling Is Headed

SWANA's RCon 2026 ran September 29 to October 2 in St. Louis, with safety, EPR, PFAS, landfill management, workforce, and recycling operations on the agenda and more than 200 exhibitors on a sold-out show floor, according to SWANA. Across the sessions, two themes kept surfacing: recycling is being treated as a supply chain, and operations technology only works when it respects how crews actually work.

Recycling is being framed as a material supply chain

At a recycling session covered by Waste360, panelists from the Circular Action Alliance, the City of Indianapolis, WM, and SC Johnson kept returning to one idea: "The waste stream becomes less of a waste stream and more of a material supply chain."

WM said it has committed about $1.4 billion across 39 projects over five years, adding 2.8 million tons of capacity, with Indianapolis preparing for universal curbside recycling by Q1 2028. Panelists also argued for simple resident instructions built around one question, "does this go here?", and urged brands to bring packaging engineers to MRFs regularly.

Routing panel: the problem was the morning, not the map

One of the more practical sessions covered how to implement routing and tell drivers where to go. Speakers included a Fairfax County, Virginia official, a city operations manager, and a consultant from HDR who was embedded with the operation for about a year.

The starting point was weak data. There was no tracking of clock-in to first can or of yard departure times, and overtime was the first symptom. Routes had equal stop counts, yet 80 to 90 percent of trucks reached the disposal site at the same time. Scripting the first 90 minutes of the workday saved 20 to 30 minutes per crew.

Panelists described routing as roughly 60 percent GIS science, 30 percent turn-by-turn work, and 10 percent local driver knowledge. That last 10 percent matters: documenting drivers' tribal knowledge, and training supervisors to use the data, came up repeatedly as keys to adoption.

What to measure

The panel's core KPIs were simple and useful for any size of fleet:

• Attendance. Late starts and absences drive overtime before routing does.

• Route completion time. Compare against plan, not just against yesterday.

• Tonnage per route. It shows whether balanced stop counts are really balanced.

• Truck hours and downtime. Idle trucks and breakdowns hide in the averages.

The tools discussed included GPS telematics and RFID tags on carts for service verification. Speakers also stressed language access for diverse crews and framing in-cab radios and tracking as a safety tool, not surveillance. How you introduce a device can decide whether drivers use it.

The floor message: if it adds work, it loses

The theme that echoed through the exhibit hall and the second day was the question of what operators need from software and what gets in their way. The answer was blunt: keep it simple. A tool that adds steps for drivers, dispatchers, or office staff will be worked around, however good it looks in a demo.

What to take back to your shop

1. Start with the morning. Track clock-in to first can and yard departures for two weeks. You may find your overtime problem before you touch a route.

2. Stagger the disposal run. Even routes can create a bottleneck at the scale house.

3. Capture driver knowledge in writing. Tight turns, gate codes, and problem stops are assets. Document them before someone retires.

4. Pick a short KPI list and share it. Four numbers that everyone understands beat twenty that nobody reads.

5. Simplify customer messaging. If your cart stickers list more than a handful of items, trim them.

Bottom line

RCon 2026 pointed in two directions at once: bigger systems thinking on recycling, and plain operational discipline on the route. Haulers and MRFs that document what they do, measure a few things well, and involve crews early will have the stronger hand.