City's reality show gets families recycling

It is said that you can learn a lot about somebody by going through his or her garbage. In "Dare to Go Zero," a new recycling reality television program created by the City of Austin's Solid Waste Services Department and government access Channel 6, four families' own garbage taught them a lot about themselves.

The show, debuting at 7 p.m. Friday and running for five weeks on Channel 6 and concurrently on the City's YouTube channel, pitted the families against each other in sort of a "Biggest Loser" for the landfill.

The competitors — chosen from a field of 52 applicant families to represent Austin's diversity and various levels of recycling commitment — participated in weekly challenges and refuse weigh-ins during February and March in an effort to win a grand prize of up to $2,000 in energy-saving home improvements.

They are:

Joseph and Elisa Barnes, who want to teach their kids Kathy and Konnar about recycling and learn new ways of reducing waste in their home.

Ashley Tompkins and Cassandra Johnson. Johnson, who started the show with no idea how or what to recycle, wanted to participate for daughter Martaeyah Walker.

Tami Kyle, who applied because her teenage son, Triston, thought people who recycled were "stupid," and said so in the family's audition.

Julia Zimmerman and avid recycler Jason Brian, whose new baby, Will, and six Chihuahuas produce a lot of trash.

The show is the brainchild of Jennifer Herber, senior public information specialist, and her colleagues at the City of Austin Solid Waste Services Department. Last October, Herber and company were looking for a fun and effective way to educate Austinites about the City's Zero Waste Goal, an effort to reduce the amount of solid waste sent to landfills by 90 percent by the year 2040.

"It sounds lofty," Herber says, "but we were looking for a way to help people see little things they could do to help us get to that goal."

In spite of a reputation for being "green," Austinites were still chucking unrecyclables such as pizza boxes, wire coat hangers, engine parts and garden hoses into recycling bins.

"We could have just done a plain old ad campaign; that's what we were planning on initially," Herber recalls. Instead, the group discovered that a county near Seattle had conducted a neighborhood recycling competition to educate customers about zero waste and single-stream recycling (the same program Austin uses, where all recyclables go into a common bin) that had garnered a lot of media attention.

Herber's crew began to joke about doing a reality show. "And then we all kind of sat there and went, ‘Wait — that's a really good idea!' " she remembers.

They took the plan to the City's Channel 6 manager Keith Reeves.

"We were instantly excited about it," Reeves says. He saw the show as a perfect opportunity to deliver a message that was important to the City of Austin while flexing the creative muscles of his production staff. "Government television is mostly thought of as public meeting coverage and news conferences. We're trying to reinvent how government television is perceived by doing programming like this," he explains.

A rough cut of the first episode indicates that Reeves is well on the way to accomplishing that. The do-it-yourself production is slicker than its $100,000 price tag would indicate — it looks and sounds like a real television show, from the opening theme by Solid Waste Services employee Herman "the German" Dietrich to the genial hosting by another city employee, Michael Bocanegra (whose real job is riding on a garbage truck and picking up bulk items).

In the first episode, the teams participate in a challenge in which they are confronted with a huge pile of trash containing items that can either be recycled, reused, composted or must be disposed of. Each team simultaneously sends one person scrambling into the pile, grabbing items and depositing them into his or her team's appropriate bins while their fellow team members coach and cheer them on. These weekly challenges don't determine the show's ultimate winners (that's based on the family that decreases its average trash output by the greatest percentage at the end of the five weeks) but challenge champions receive small prizes for their victories.