For Disneyland Resort, improving waste diversion does not begin when a material reaches a recycling bin (also known as a table top for guests when no actual tables are available). It begins with deciding what the resort purchases, and continues through how materials are collected and sorted, and ultimately depends on whether a processor can turn those materials into something valuable.

For Disneyland Resort, improving waste diversion does not begin when a material reaches a recycling bin (also known as a table top for guests when no actual tables are available). It begins with deciding what the resort purchases, and continues through how materials are collected and sorted, and ultimately depends on whether a processor can turn those materials into something valuable.

That was the central lesson from a panel at RCon 2026 featuring Disneyland Zero Waste Manager Adam Schlachter, Dragonfly Founder and CEO Sam Ares, and Republic Services Director of Circular Solutions Joe Riconosciuto.

The discussion showed how better data can connect decisions that are often treated separately, from day-to-day waste collection to procurement, and downstream processing. This is something we’ve seen in smart cities around the U.S. and Disneyland, being it’s own “city” is making it work on a magical scale.

For Disneyland, the first benefit is operational.

The resort operates around the clock, seven days a week, meaning a full container can quickly become a labor and logistics problem. Those churro wrappers can overwhelm a Tomorrowland bin quickly. Historically, Schlachter said, Disneyland largely relied on receipts and invoices to understand what was happening with its waste but technology has given the resort greater visibility into container capacity and material movement.

“If I know a bin is full because I have a sensor telling me it's full at 6 p.m., I can deploy a message to the team,” Schlachter said.

Instead of having employees check every container, Disneyland can direct cast members to the locations that actually need attention. That saves labor, but it can also protect diversion.

If a recycling or food-scrap container is full and employees do not know where else to put the material, Schlachter said, that material can end up with the landfill contractor.

“So we lose a diversion opportunity,” he said.

The resort has also used data to identify opportunities to improve the quality of its food-scrap stream, with the session highlighting a significant reduction in contamination. That illustrates an important distinction: measuring diversion is not enough. Generators also need to understand why material is being lost and what can be changed upstream. That same philosophy is now being applied to procurement.

Disneyland uses millions of cups, making them an obvious target for analysis. Rather than simply asking whether a discarded cup is recyclable, the resort is working with Republic to determine what characteristics make a cup more likely to be successfully collected, sorted, and processed.

That puts procurement directly into the recycling conversation.

Riconosciuto explained that a recovered material needs to exist in sufficient volume, be safely accessible, and have a viable end market. There is also a significant difference between downcycling a material into another product and achieving true circularity.

For plastics, package-to-package recycling requires much higher levels of purity and consistency. Contamination can reduce recovery, lower bale quality, and disrupt the mass balance of a modern MRF.

That is where a large generator such as Disneyland can have an unusual amount of influence. If it can change what it buys, it can potentially change what enters the recycling system in the first place.

Riconosciuto described a potential future in which a Disneyland polypropylene cup could be traced from the theme park through collection, sorting, and polymer processing, eventually becoming food-grade material that could be used to manufacture another cup. That kind of chain-of-custody approach moves recycling from simply keeping material out of a landfill and toward demonstrating real circularity.

But connecting all of those steps requires more than collecting more data. It requires making different data sets work together.

Ares said different AI and computer-vision systems can measure the same material in different ways. Rather than attempting to directly compare complicated measurements from different systems, he suggested using simpler questions where possible, such as whether a specific object appeared at a particular point in the system, and then comparing changes within the same system over time.

That creates another challenge: data sharing.

Technology providers may view operational information as intellectual property, while generators and processors need access to information that can help them make better decisions together. Ares said companies need to establish what information should be shared and create secure ways to exchange it.

Riconosciuto said the most important information for processors is ultimately straightforward: knowing what is actually moving through the system.

“We just want to know what's in the system,” he said. “What's on those belts? That's the most important thing for us to have access to.”

The Disneyland example points toward a broader shift. Recycling data does not have to be something reviewed after the fact to produce a monthly diversion report. It can become an operational tool, one that helps determine where employees work, what materials get purchased, how MRFs are configured, and whether recovered commodities can meet the specifications of an end market.