Waste Hauler sorts off-site

Kevin, it seems likely that the approach you're suggesting could work. A similar issue often occurs in LEED-NC MRc2: Construction Waste Management, and using the facility diversion rates works there.

Kevin, The intent of the summary table is to help the building management understand what materials are generated at what rates, and also how effective occupants are at sorting their waste according the buildings separation strategy (presumably it's best when recyclables get into the recycling bags, because the sorting facility has a higher recovery rate/less contamination). So, my opinion is that using the values that the hauler supplies is not the most useful here (though very useful for documenting MRc7). I would recommend entering the weights and types associated with the trash bags as "Landfill Stream" (even if some of the material gets sorted out and recycled eventually) and the weights and types associated with the recycling bags as "Diversion Stream".

100% of our building waste is sent to for off-site sorting that typically recycles 63% of all waste. In achieving this credit we may propose to our vendor to collect waste for a 24 hour period and then weigh the total. Then our vendor would sort and weigh the amount that could be recycled, and then subtract the recycled amount from the original total to what really is going to the landfill. Does this seem accurate?

I'm not totally sure what you mean by "then subtract the recycled amount from the original total to what really is going to the landfill."However, I would be concerned that this approach is not going to be really effective for your project. It sounds like you'd basically be asking your vendor to do what they normally do, and then report the numbers to you. It sounds more like they're auditing their own performance—which doesn't really make sense.

Rather than just using the overall % diversion rate, is their a better approach to this credit? My thought was: if there was 500 lbs sent to the sorting station we would have the vendor seperate the 500 lbs from all other waste and sort it out providing us with an actual weight that is being diverted from the landfill - lets say 200 lbs (recycled), we would then say only 300 lbs is being sent to the landfill and 200 lbs is being recycled.

You need to reports types of waste by weight or volume. There's a bunch more info on this above.I still don't get why you would want your own vendor to do this for you. Seems like this would be a good chance to see how effective their service is at diverting waste. The whole goal of this credit is to improve waste diversion.

We may choose to do the sorting ourselves onsite to evaluate our vendor, perhaps we could even do it at their facility in our presence. I understand the goal is improve waste diversion but with our current structure, 100% of waste is lumped together and then sorted to recycle everything possible, I guess the one thing that could improve is creating a method to prevent tainting potential recycables.

I think that if you gave the same container of comingled waste to 10 different vendors, they would have several different diversion rates. I bet it would cluster around one rate, but there might be some outliers, good and bad. This seems like a chance to check up on how your vendor is doing.Other things to improve on, as you allude to, might be recycling smaller volume recyclables that get lost, like e-goods, batteries, metals, etc.