Last week, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava and Deputy Mayor Roy Coley introduced the county’s Zero Waste Master Plan, a 13-year roadmap aimed at diverting and recovering 90% of the county’s waste from landfills by 2040.
The plan, developed with consulting firm WSP through public workshops, surveys and meetings with municipalities and industry groups, lays out 31 strategies grouped into four categories: rethink and redesign, reduce and reuse, recycling and composting and material processing infrastructure. They range from a countywide “save-as-you-throw” pricing model to a new construction and demolition debris processing facility, reuse warehouses and water bottle refill stations.
The numbers behind the push are revealing.
Miami-Dade generates more than 5 million tons of waste a year, and landfill capacity is shrinking. In 2024, the county’s baseline year for the plan, only 36% of waste was diverted from disposal. County planners project that figure could climb to 77% if every strategy in the plan is fully implemented, cutting an estimated 1.7 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of taking more than 405,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.
Full implementation is projected to cost about $1.36 million, with roughly $1 million in one-time startup costs and $349,000 annually, plus three new county staff positions.
The plan also leans on a partnership with the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau to push waste reduction, food recovery and reusable serviceware in the hospitality industry.
For Key Biscayne, the plan’s most direct references come in its inventory of existing municipal policies. The village’s “Plastic-Free KB” ordinance is listed among the county’s examples of local zero waste action already underway, alongside efforts in Miami Beach, Surfside and other municipalities.
The plan also flags a quirk in the island’s own recycling program: Key Biscayne is one of the few municipalities that does not currently accept glass bottles, yogurt containers, aluminum pie pans or aluminum foil curbside, items most of the rest of the county collects.
That gap could come under pressure from one of the plan’s short-term policy strategies: a proposed Universal Recycling and Composting Ordinance that would apply to every sector, not just single-family homes.
For condominiums, which make up the majority of Key Biscayne’s housing, and who typically run their own recycling arrangements independent of the county, the ordinance would require buildings to add composting bins alongside existing recycling and garbage bins, sized to the number of units and made as accessible as the dumpsters. It would also mandate standardized recycling signage and cart colors and require haulers, including condos’ private contractors, to report collection tonnage to the county or municipality.
The plan’s Save-As-You-Throw pricing strategy, which would charge single-family homeowners based on garbage cart size to encourage waste reduction, is written specifically for curbside cart service and does not apply to condominiums. Key Biscayne’s condos, which negotiate their own dumpster or compactor service and recycling contracts separately from single-family collection meaning that particular incentive wouldn’t reach most island households unless a parallel mechanism is developed for multifamily buildings.
Biscayne Bay water quality or coastal resilience is not named directly in the County’s master plan, which focuses on materials management rather than stormwater. The document does touch on construction and demolition debris rules and green building credits, categories that regularly intersect with the density and redevelopment pressures Key Biscayne officials have wrestled with at recent Village Council meetings.
County officials said implementation will roll out in short (one to four years), medium (five to nine years) and long-term (10 to 13 years) phases, with the county providing municipalities model ordinance language and technical support along the way.
Visit miamidade.gov/solidwaste for more details.