Josephine Valencia

摘要

JOSEPHINE VALENCIA LIKES to say she's been 'talking trash' for more than 25 years across four states. In 2010, she accepted an offer to become the San Antonio Solid Waste Management Department (SWMD) assistant director. The Texas city provides weekly automated collection to 370,000 residential homes for garbage (brown cart), recycling (blue cart), and green cart (combined food scraps and yard waste). The department also handles fleet operations, closed landfill maintenance, and homeless camp abatements. In 2021, Valencia was promoted to Deputy Director, transitioning from operations to a more administrative function, overseeing a $160 million budget, contract compliance, warehouse operations, safety, and marketing-the latter of which she says is a perfect fit for her creative side. Valencia says when she is not 'talking trash', she likes to draw-mostly around environmental themes. "Consumer education-especially about recycling-is what most of us think about marketing when it comes to solid waste," says Valencia, adding SWMD's marketing efforts transcend educating people on proper recycling to driver recruitment through a multi-faceted campaign of radio, job fairs, digital, and movie theater advertising. SWMD hired 73 drivers in the past year and is on track to meet its zero-vacancy goal. With about 39 percent of the San Antonio population speaking Spanish, SWMD translates all written communication into Spanish and Valencia reviews all the translations. "If your translator uses 'coleccion' for garbage collection, then you need to a hire a new translator," Valencia notes. "In Spanish, you can have a 'coleccion' of stamps and other objects. But the physical act of collecting is translated as 'recolec-cion' or (less common) 'la recojida'. Another warning sign for bad translations is when you see days of the week capitalized-you don't do that in Spanish." Valencia also deals with the SWMD's Safety Management System. Those in the industry know the general public doesn't always appreciate the inherent danger of garbage collection, notes Valencia.