Do Airbnbs produce extra trash? Raquel Regalado wants to know — and maybe charge a fee if so

Judging from her schedule, Raquel Regalado doesn't appear to enjoy down time much. Image via Miami-Dade County.

Do short-term vacation rentals — homes advertised as hotel alternatives on platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo and HomeAway — create garbage at a faster rate than neighboring residential properties?

Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado wants to know, and she has filed a resolution to get answers and possibly charge the rental properties extra to cover the county’s extra waste collection costs.

The measure is up for consideration Monday by the Infrastructure, Innovation and Technology Committee, a sub-panel of the County Commission that Regalado chairs.

If approved, it would direct Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s administration to compare the trash output of vacation rental properties with that of “comparable residential use properties.”

Based on that assessment, county staff would then have to provide a report within 90 days, complete with recommendations for how to offset any additional impacts due to excess garbage, including new or adjusted waste collection fees.

Regalado told Florida Politics the resolution is part of a larger effort she has undertaken since talks arose of canceling Miami-Dade’s recycling program in August 2023. That includes work to negotiate a new recycling contract for the county and a composting program in her district, which includes a recycling education component.

Through that program and others, Regalado said she found there are “a lot” of short-term vacation rentals in District 7. And according to locals and code compliance complaints some filed, the properties are responsible for a disproportionate share of the neighborhood rubbish.

Part of the reason, she said, is that vacation rentals typically house more people than usual.

“And obviously, the more humans you have, the more Grubhub they order and the more trash they create, especially on the long weekend,” she said.

“So, I just want to look at it and be able to see if that’s something that we need to tackle.”

NBC 6 reported last year that as of December 2023, there were more than 22,000 available short-term vacation rental listings in Miami-Dade County, according to data from AirDNA.

Regalado’s item comes as Miami-Dade continues an effort to locate a site upon which to build the nation’s largest trash incinerator to replace one that burned down two years ago. Legislation by Sens. Bryan Ávila and Jonathan Martin and Reps. David Borrero and Meg Weinberger to limit where the facility could rise nearly passed last week before its sponsors yanked it from consideration.